No Hard Feelings (2023) If any lesser actress than Jennifer Lawrence had starred in this thing, I wouldn't waste 10 seconds watching it.......
But what can I say? Here at BQ, we dearly love us some J-Law, so how could we ever stay away from it? Especially when she's attempting to breathe new life into a genre that once ruled the multiplexes and video stores of the 1980's......the raunch filled rom-com loaded with horny young guys and hot-to-trot babes bursting out of their bikinis........oh yes, please......
And to her everlasting credit, the Oscar-winning Lawrence goes all in here, fully hurling herself into the no-holds-barred, shameless smutty spirit that any Raunch-Fest worth its sleaze demands......
While she more than held up her end of the bargain, writer-director Gene Stupnitsky did not. This guy dropped the ball so badly, the film stinks on multiple levels.
Minimal raunchy gags and situations pop up, and what little of them the film sparingly doles out (mostly in the first half hour),,,,,,,they aren't worth more than a few smirks and chuckles. You can tell from the way every unfunny gag lands with a thud, that Stupnitsk has no affinity whatsoever for this stuff. His heart just isn't in it, even as his lead actress practically burst blood vessels to squeeze out some laughs.....
After the film's first act, it more or less gives up on the whole raunch-com idea and struggles to turn itself into some sort of half-assed, sentiment-stricken coming-of-age story.
J-Law, a take-no-prisoners Uber-driver/bartender, can't make ends meet as a workin' stiff in Montauk New York, a Long Island beach vacation spot for wealthy uppercrusts. Desperate to pay the now exorbitant property taxes on her house, she takes on a task offered by a couple of those 1 percenters (Matthew Broderick, Laura Benanti).......the mission - to bring their severely introverted, solitary, virginal son (Andrew Barth Feldman) out of his shell before he starts college in the fall.
And we all know what "out of his shell" means, don't we.....heh, heh, heh.......
Lawrence, as you'd expect, starts out by cornering the boy with overly aggressive sexuality, but the kid's sweet, gentle nature serves to soften her up, smooth out her hard edges and reveal her own vulnerabilities.
But as you watch the whole film play out, you start to realize why this movie can't handle any of the disparate genres it's dabbling in.........the raunch is dumb and mirthless and the coming-of-age tropes look and sound phoned in from a standard playbook.
And watching J-Law toil herself into the ground to make this worthless script into something worth sitting through is a depressing sight......and one of the biggest disappointments of the year so far.
1 & 1/2 stars (* 1/2) for her tireless bravura work here......otherwise I'd slap "No Hard Feelings" with a Zero.......fans of the actress might want to wait until it lands on a streaming service that doesn't require an extra sign-up fee.......
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