Here is a film whose premise will make you feel so old you might as well just go and wait outside your local crematorium: an age-gap comedy in which the elder party is 32. In No Hard Feelings, Jennifer Lawrence stars as Maddie, a younger millennial with a hectic sex life and a parlous job in the gig economy, driving Ubers in a pretty beachside town in New York State.
When her car is repossessed, she scans the small ads for a cheap replacement, and finds one with a single, highly improbable string attached. A well-to-do couple, played by Matthew Broderick and Laura Benanti, are prepared to donate their spare motor to any woman who can (secretly) seduce and sleep with Percy (Andrew Barth Feldman), their timid 19-year-old son. Having subjected the kid to a cotton-wool-covered childhood, they’ve belatedly realised a formative fling might be character-building, especially before he leaves for college.
Maddie assumes this will be easy – and given she’s played by Jennifer Lawrence, quite reasonably so. But she reckons without Percy’s bulletproof Gen Z prudishness, and finds her every advance primly rebuffed.
Allow me to let you in on a secret: we film critics are desperate to rave about a big, raunchy, star-driven studio comedy again, not least because the form has been as good as dead for 10 years. But a non-negotiable part of the bargain is that the comedy in question must not be, in the main, a load of mirthless drivel, and it is at this crucial hurdle that No Hard Feelings falls.
It’s not simply that its various comedic scenarios aren’t funny (though they aren’t); or that all of its would-be snappy one-liners drop on the floor like wet socks (though they do), or that the timing is so off that it feels like the film was edited with a spork. It’s that nobody on screen, Lawrence included, seems remotely invested in the exercise in the first place. “We had so much fun making it!” is something you often hear actors say about comedies that don’t quite work out. The cast of No Hard Feelings behave like they’re there on community service.
