J-Law is back!

To close, we’ll be taking a look at the reason for Sex Comedy Week itself: No Hard Feelings!

Tyler Clark
June 23, 2023

Good morning Consumers. This is Please Consume, the Film newsletter that loves you more than Ben Affleck loves being from Boston.

No Hard Feelings (2023)

To close, we’ll be taking a look at the reason for Sex Comedy Week itself: No Hard Feelings!

It’s the Jennifer Lawrence star vehicle that is trying its damnedest to save the modern studio comedy.

Can it do it?

Well, we'll just have to wait and find out. Based on its box office tracking it’s not looking great, but let’s set numbers aside and talk about how it fairs as a film.

The Screenplay

The largest hurdle that No Hard Feelings has to jump is its own premise.

The film is a classic high concept studio comedy, telling the story of Maddie, a 32 year old bartender, Uber driver, who needs a car after her ride is repossessed by her ex-boyfriend. She comes across a Craigslist ad that says, basically, date our son and we’ll give you this old beater car.

So now the goal is to meet, date, and eventually sleep with this Princeton bound young adult.

While a solid enough premise, the film really hangs its hat on its inciting incident, never really moving past it into new territory. It constantly reinforces the central conflict, and yet doesn’t quite trust its audience to move forward, always staying in its lane.

Some of our favorite comedies here at Please Consume are films that shift in their premise halfway through.

Yes, the 40-Year-Old Virgin has the central premise of “we’re trying to get this guy laid” but halfway through the film Catherine Keener enters the movie and the film takes a massive shift and shifts again when she leaves.

Or in Tropic Thunder; it starts out a comedy about filmmaking, then becomes a survivalist comedy and ends on an Apocalypse Now parody.

One of the absolute fundamentals to good comedy is the art of surprise, and when your film stays within the boundaries of its own initial story beats, there is nothing that you won’t see coming on a scene to scene basis.

Star Power

What the film lacks in its structure it makes up for in its central performances. The film is only enjoyable because you are able to relax in the steady hands of Lawrence and newcomer Andrew Barth Feldman.

Jennifer Lawrence was at one point a staple of Hollywood, but in the last couple of years has taken a break from the limelight to focus on herself (we love our emotionally aware queens). However, in the last couple of years she has starred in Adam Mckay’s Don’t Look Up, was Oscar nominated for her role in the PTSD war drama Causeway, and now this.

She is one of these people that just feels undeniable when on screen, constantly churning out great work even when the material doesn’t deserve it. She is quite bold in this and not just because of her nude scene. It’s because she isn’t afraid to swing in both directions, towing a line between the perception of aging but also owning her own beauty.

Then we have Feldman’s performance as Percy, the awkward teen who Lawrence is trying to get with. His character and his performance, by extension, take a moment to click in, but once it does he goes on a run of great moments that shows you what he is really capable of.

We especially want to highlight his musical number, which starts out somewhat comedic then goes over to heartfelt and then just damn impressive. Feldman, while unrecognizable to many of us, is a recent star in the world of Broadway. He went from playing the Dicaprio role in his school’s rendition of Catch Me if You Can to being asked to perform at the Jimmy Awards which helped get him the titular role of Evan Hanson in Dear Evan Hanson on Broadway.

We are so excited to see what he does next because whatever it is, we’re in.

The film is rounded out by a surprising run of comics and comedic performers. The highlight is Scott McArthur who has been quietly putting in the work as a guest star on all your girlfriends’ favorite sitcoms and is just scoring buckets in this. Every time he pops up we as the audience are able to relax in the safe hands he provides us with.

On the other end of the spectrum, you have Matthew Brodrick playing the father of our teen hero, and to say he’s sleep walking through this is an insult to Mike Birbiglia and Sleep Walkers everywhere.

Why Go for Heart

The last major hang up I have with No Hard Feelings is that it desperately wants to reach for something outside of its means.

Mainly, the film drops bombs about our heroes and their tragic pasts that at no point feel earned or even really necessary to the momentum of the story. If anything, the heart hurts the film.

Now, I am a fan of sentimentality. I love movies with heart and can cry rivers at the drop of a hat. But with something like this the heart is just tacked on.

When you look at something like Step Brothers you see a film that actively mocks the idea of sentimentality in favor of more jokes, thus maintaining momentum and holding our attention in a way No Hard Feelings is simply unable to.

It does all of this mostly in the third act when it’s most important and also most difficult to keep the audience invested. And on top of that, as mentioned before, there is zero trust built into the audience's ability to track what is happening, so every emotional revelation just feels forced.

Conclusion

While not groundbreaking, No Hard Feelings is an enjoyable, if not unremarkable, trip to the movies. It’s bolstered by an overqualified cast that will leave you satisfied with plenty of laughs and absolutely nothing else.

I give it 13 lobster claws🦞