'No Hard Feelings' Movie Review: An absurd comedy that just about manages to entertain

No Hard Feelings

Film: No Hard Feelings
Cast: Jennifer Lawrence, Andrew Barth Feldman, Laura Benanti, Matthew Broderick, Natalie Morales, Hasan Minhaj, Ebon Moss-Bachrach, Kyle Mooney
Director: Gene Stupnitsky
Rating: 2.5/5
Runtime: 103 min

Oscar-winner Jennifer Lawrence changes her genre staple from drama to raunchy comedy with this fairly engaging, though absurd comedy.

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‘No Hard Feelings' directed by Gene Stupnitsky has an outlandish premise centering on Maddie Barker (Lawrence), a Montauk-based Uber driver in her early thirties, who is on the verge of bankruptcy and is desperate enough to try her luck with any sliver of hope…even if it be an odd job advertisement in Craiglist that offers a Buick Regal as compensation for dating a wealthy couple's (Matthew Broderick and Laura Benanti) 19-year-old son Percy (Andrew Barth Feldman) and getting him out of his shell. Though Maggie is eager to get the job done she soon discovers that the awkward, clueless Percy is no sure thing.

It's the contrasting personalities and the way they play against each other that brings in the laughs here. Percy's clueless, awkward anxiety-riddled vibe gives eager beaver Maddie a run for her money. Slapstick abounds but the script wants to go beyond the humorous and score points for sentiment. That's when the narrative begins to falter. It comes to a point where you begin to feel that everything is being forced against the run of play. There's no balance and the tempo feels stuttered - much like the anxiety-riddled Percy. When the narrative tries to interject sequences of two lonely people belonging to different generations and classes influencing each other in different ways, it begins to drag.

Towards the second half, we see the narrative moving in a totally different direction. Though modeled on the raunchy comedies of the 80s and 90's this film fails to sustain its momentum and finds itself on shaky ground.

This low-stakes comedy scores well on the acting front though. Both Lawrence (as the boisterous, hasty, cynical Caddie) and Feldman (coming straight from Broadway and getting the awkward insecurity bang on) strike some sparks off each other and make the engagement much livelier and more entertaining than the mediocre material allowed. Their assured offbeat, physical, comedic performances are what keep the audience invested even when the promising beginning is lost in a sea of unviable stereotypical sentimentality.