REVIEW: No Hard Feelings [2023]

Rating: R | Runtime: 103 minutes
Release Date: June 23rd, 2023 (USA)
Studio: Columbia Pictures
Director(s): Gene Stupnitsky
Writer(s): Gene Stupnitsky & John Phillips

Does anyone even f*ck anymore?

There’s no better commentary on No Hard Feelings being made/released in 2023 as a throwback to the raunchy R-rated comedies we received in the 80s and 90s then a moment when Maddie (Jennifer Lawrence) tells two soon-to-be Princeton freshmen to screw each other. It’s the sort of comeback you would always hear when drunk coeds objectified a woman who has had enough. It provides an easy means with which to emasculate toxicity—playing into the presumed homophobia that causes men to act the way they do regardless of the retort’s inherent dismissal of homosexuality as a punch line.

Director Gene Stupnitsky and co-writer John Phillips thankfully know this, so they flip the scene on its head … twice. One: the coeds aren’t sexualizing Maddie. They are in fact calling her old and out-of-place as a thirty-two-year-old attending a high school party. Two: the coeds call her out for being in the wrong, accusing her of bigotry before shaming her by taking out their phones to record. It’s the sort of “pc-joke” that will give Red State America aneurisms while screaming “woke!” at the top of their lungs and a witty, timely, and self-aware subversion that earns a laugh from those who see the history packed into the exchange. And it’s also a prime example for why films like this no longer need to exist.

Because while No Hard Feelings succeeds in its goal to harken back to yesteryear, it also succeeds in proving why yesteryear should remain in the past. Gender-swapping the characters so Lawrence gets a nude fight scene that Hollywood can label “empowering” doesn’t negate the fact that the subject matter itself is still reductive and dated to the point of obsolescence no matter the perspective shift. The script knows it too since it’s constantly toeing the line in a way that defangs the raunchiness for overt life lessons that need a manipulative score to remind us that these human beings are hurting and searching for community while trapped beneath their respective “daddy issues.”

As such, it’s tough to truly love or hate the result. It’s funny and stupid. It’s crass and heartfelt. It’s perpetually trying to have its cake and eat it too. If not for Lawrence and co-star Andrew Barth Feldman (as nineteen-year-old Percy, whose parents hire Maddie to “deflower” him in exchange for a car she needs to work and save her mother’s home from seizure by the IRS), I’d probably hate this film for never quite having the guts to be the movie it so desperately pretends it is. They are so good and authentic in their feelings and epiphanies that you can almost believe the filmmakers were making a character study rather than exploiting one for cheap laughs. My final verdict: It’s fine!