No Hard Feelings review: Jennifer Lawrence’s latest film is a brave attempt to revisit the sex comedies of yore but falls short on laughs

Jennifer Lawrence and Natalie Morales in No Hard Feelings. (Screen shot/Sony Pictures Entertainment)

No Hard Feelings isn’t the kind of loud, bilious adult comedy we regularly consumed more than two decades ago. But it’s an interesting experiment masquerading as a comment on how self-serious the world has become.

In a scene from No Hard Feelings, Maddie played by Jennifer Lawrence, searches for her teen friend at a pre-college party. She opens random doors to find young teenagers glued to their phones, laptops or VR headsets. “Doesn’t anyone just f**k anymore,” she says, dumbfounded. It’s a sequence that establishes where this part-raunchy part-awkward sex comedy is coming from. Somewhere along the line we became so woke, so sensitized by our anxieties around intimacy, that we separated the bare-knuckled act of it from the meaning it now seems cursed to have to carry. Caught in the web of its own tertiary interpretations, each more cautious and dry than the last, sex sounds more complicated than it ever has. It has evidently made humour around casual sex unpalatable, maybe even offensive. When was the last time you watched a raunchy teen comedy without worrying about the sociological implications of the things you were laughing at? It’s a question No Hard Feelings manages to just about ask.

Directed by Gene Stupnitsky, the film follows Maddie, a down-on-her-luck resident of suburban Montauk. Maddie does odd-jobs, including driving an Uber, to keep a roof over her head. She also stands to lose the roof if she doesn’t put together some money quick or get herself a new car. Helped by the trash-talking couple (the comic highlight of the film) that also doubles up as her reality check, she lands on an absurd advertisement in a local paper. The parents of a 19-year-old, Percy (Andrew Barth Feldman), are looking to hire a woman to bring their reluctant, virgin boy ‘out of his shell’. It’s a bizarre hook that takes you back to the whacky days when coming-of-age adult comedies were raised and dressed in transparent wax before being lit on fire and rolled out like explosive oddities at a circus. That circus has since become guarded, caged and maybe, just maybe, a little joyless.

Maddie’s given the task to date Percy, who is a good-at-heart nerd with an inferiority complex. It’s a straightforward job that becomes complicated because of his incapacity to seize the moment that his age demands of him. More than a decade apart in age, both leads need some growing up to do in. some way or the other. Though sluggish in parts, unfunny for stretches, No Hard Feelings, if nothing else, at least turns the clock back to a time when sexual energy didn’t automatically translate as menace. Men and women could lustily talk about the mechanics of an act we have maybe assigned far too much psychological wealth in recent years. That is not to say that sexual trauma, abuse, etc., ought not to be championed as cornerstones of a new storytelling order but something has fallen through the cracks of this self-serious image of the world that makes just about any joke offensive, much before it feels frivolous.

No Hard Feelings doesn’t come anywhere close to a Superbad or even the daft but iconic American Pie films for that matter but the very fact that an A-list star like Lawrence wills herself into a goofy, self-deprecating role says something. Here she has pepper sprayed into her eyes, is tossed from the bonnet of a car into the sea and is resoundingly rejected by a cocooned teenager whose shell appears to be thicker than a double-brick wall. This is the prom queen’s other half of the story. Moreover, Lawrence plays precisely her age, unawed by the proposition of offering herself as bait for those who leer and those who are looking to laugh. To someone who not too long ago was the victim of an explosive phone leak, it’s a brave little ship to board. A ship that Lawrence and her co-actors row with commitment, but can’t sustain for the length of the journey for the lack, ironically, of a few slap-stick profane, punchlines if you like. And that’s telling.

In a post MeToo world where shows like Euphoria and I May Destroy You have foregrounded sexual trauma, it’s hard to imagine a sex comedy can even arouse, if you like, the kind of interest that adult comedies did two decades ago. Have we grown wiser, understood that the theatricality around sex and intimacy is rarely as animated or as edgy as these films claim it to be? Or have we graduated to this unstimulating dimension from where nothing is as it seems. A dimension from where everything ought to have depth, layers, and codified meaning, for effect. It sounds about right, but it also sounds spiritless and boring. It’s something No Hard Feelings pokes at but unfortunately doesn’t quite interrogate with any sort of vigour. The film instead folds into a familiar shape, surrendering to the coastal charms of a town, plucking friendship out of a dalliance that could have taken a wilder, braver route. It also, revealingly, struggles with the one thing that is maybe becoming increasingly hard to write – a sex joke. Thankfully, though, Lawrence and Co. give it a fair shot.