Movie Review: No Hard Feelings

Jennifer Lawrence won 3 Golden Globe awards and one Oscar for best actress in “Silver Linings Playbook” in 2013. Lawrence is one of the very few actors who have won several major acting awards at a very young age. Jennifer’s last two high-quality acting roles were “Joy” in 2015 and “American Hustle” in 2013. Unfortunately getting the next high-quality movie role requires a great script, written by a great screenwriter – a few-and-far-between miracle that does not come around that often.

As far as deciding to take the role of a bad comedy called “No Hard Feelings”, it is very hard to believe that Lawrence could have read this script, and then decided to actually act in this movie. This film is at best below average, in terms of both the story and any appearance of something that is actually funny. The acid test for any comedy – nobody laughed in the theater I was in.

Once again, Lawrence felt the need to stay relevant, more than her desire to only act in high-quality productions. We can only hope that Jennifer will not be going the Robert De Niro route of making a string of bad comedies, that are well below her standards.

The story of No Hard Feelings is about the parents of a young college-bound boy, Alison and Laird Becker, played by Laura Benanti and Matthew Broderick and Andrew Barth Feldman, who plays their son Percy. Alison and Laird are concerned about Percy’s shy introverted personality before he goes off to college, so they hire Maddie, played by Jennifer Lawrence as a kind of sex surrogate for their son, which creates incidents of attempted comedy that mostly do no work throughout this story. If Maddie can pull off significantly changing their son, then she will get their used car. It is hard to believe that this idea was greenlighted as a mainstream movie. The most insane thing about this movie is Lawrence agreeing to do a nude-fight scene on a beach at night while 3 teenagers are trying to steal her clothes. What was she thinking there?

The Rotten Tomatoes rating for this film is a correctly low 67%, with my rating at 50% for a solid miss this movie opinion.