‘No Hard Feelings’ Review: How Lucky Can a Nerdy Kid Get?

The premise that motors “No Hard Feelings,” a brand new comedy directed by Gene Stupnitsky, is, if not outright indecent, at the least a little bit crass. Via on-line commercial, Laird and Allison, megawealthy Montauk residents, are in search of a lovely girl in her early 20s to deflower their socially awkward Princeton-bound son, Percy. In return for this service they’ll bestow a not-quite brand-new automobile on the kinda-sorta prostitute.

Taking up the supply is Jennifer Lawrence’s Maddie, a lifelong Montauker who’s more and more resentful of the wealthy people taking on her city. She’s 32 and a little bit too outdated for the gig, however she’s a knockout — as talked about, she’s performed by Lawrence — and has a canny gross sales pitch.

Capricious and promiscuous as she is, Maddie isn’t a professional escort, however a bartender and ride-hail driver whose automobile has been repossessed — and if she will be able to’t decide individuals up, she will be able to’t earn sufficient to pay the tax lien on the home she inherited from her mom. Assigned to “date date” the puppy-cute however initially extremely recessive 19-year-old Percy, she goes after her prey with an aggressiveness that’s initially off-putting to the lad. (He maces her at one level.)

The film’s trailer has elicited howls of shock in some sex-unfriendly social media circles. But the film itself handles the hook in a approach that aspires to boost eyebrows, not encourage a Congressional listening to. Once Maddie is obliged to really hang around with Percy, she begins to love him. And simply as she acts on her directions to “get him out of his shell,” he persuades her to contemplate why she’ll be dead-ending it in Montauk for the foreseeable future. If you don’t see this coming, you don’t know Hollywood.

The film doesn’t break up the distinction between raunchy intercourse farce and twin private progress research a lot as complacently fall between rom-com subgenres. It amiably alternates commonplace depictions of introspective intimacy with ostensibly bar-raising, outré set items. As when, upon being interrupted whereas skinny-dipping with Percy, Maddie rushes out of the ocean to ship a buck-naked beat all the way down to some townies making an attempt to steal their garments.

One would possibly argue that the film doesn’t really want that form of factor, given the arrogance and enchantment of its lead performers. But once more, Hollywood. In any occasion, Lawrence is a persistently incandescent display screen presence, and her position lets her run via her biggest performative hits, so to talk. She’s goofily attractive, poignantly wide-eyed and retains a beaming, you-can-deny-her-nothing smile. As Percy, Andrew Barth Feldman frames the character’s awkwardness in a quiet register for probably the most half, however in additional expansive nerd moments remembers a younger Martin Short. Matthew Broderick and Laura Benanti are current and proper because the peculiar mother and father. But Natalie Morales, Scott MacArthur and Zahn McClarnon as Maddie’s townie friends, who present sardonic working class solidarity for our heroine, have a few of the image’s choicest bits.

No Hard Feelings
Rated R for language, themes, sexuality, a buck-naked beat down. Running time: 1 hour 43 minutes. In theaters.