Stream It Or Skip It: ‘No Hard Feelings’ on Netflix, Where Jennifer Lawrence Gives a Raunchy Sex-Com a Needed Boost

No Hard Feelings (now on Netflix, in addition to streaming on VOD services like Amazon Prime Video) famously features Jennifer Lawrence 100 percent in the buff, fully stitchless, airing everything out in the breeze, nakey-nakey-eggs-and-bakey. Which is a way of saying it’s a movie that’s great for watching at home, although remember, Jesus is always watching, especially if you keep rewinding the same scene over and over and over again. Anyway, if that’s not enough to pique your interest, Lawrence also exercises her considerable comedy chops, anchoring a medium-bawdy sort-of-farce, playing a 32-year-old woman hired to deflower a 19-year-old wallflower. So yes, it’s an anomaly, a sex comedy (from Good Boys director Gene Stupnitsky) released during a time when sex comedies are increasingly rare, and it stars an Oscar-winning A-list superstar who isn’t afraid to show a side of herself we haven’t seen without turning off Google safe search.   

NO HARD FEELINGS: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: Rich people are gentrifying the working class right out of Montauk, an East Coast town rife with commercial fisherpeople, surfers and folks who watched After the Bite with some vested interest. Maddie (Lawrence) wakes up one morning to the sound of a tow truck – coincidentally driven by one of her apparently many exes – hauling away her Toyota. Civil asset forfeiture. She can’t afford the taxes on the house she inherited from her late mother. Losing her car adds injury to injury; she drives Uber when she’s not bartending. But! Wouldn’t you know it, she comes across an online ad that’s a low-stakes riff on Indecent Proposal: A rich couple wants to hire someone to bring their 19-year-old son out of his shell before he leaves for Princeton. And the payment? A gently used Buick Regal.  

This scenario seems tailor-made for Maddie, as if she was in a movie and someone behind the scenes was plotting everything out, plugging and playing like a baby putting round pegs into round holes. It doesn’t take much reading between the lines to understand that she’s something of a wayward soul – not much career direction, a little immature, seems to spend a lot of time drinking and foolin’ around with men while her peers start families, you know, the stereotypical Movie Character who couldn’t possibly find happiness living such a gasp-worthy pearl-clutchy nonconformist lifestyle. Anyway: She rollerblades over to the Becker family home, which is one of those gated concrete fortresses with lots of airy spaciousness and sharp corners, nary a speck of dust to be found and beige people wearing beige sweaters sitting on beige furniture. Those people are Laird (Matthew Broderick), a name Maddie can’t quite wrangle with her tongue, and his wife Allison (Laura Benanti), who are exactly the type of privileged richies driving people like her out of Montauk. She’s no dummy – she’s aware of the irony here, but she really really really does not want to lose her house. “You want me to ‘date’ him?” she says. “I’ll ‘date’ his brains out.”

So Laird and Allison send her to the animal shelter where Percy (Andrew Barth Feldman) volunteers, so she can pretend to want to adopt a dog while aggressively pursuing the poor kid’s peen. And I say “poor kid” because he’s unwitting and a nice guy who can’t help that he was raised by smothery parents who realized what they were doing a little too late and are now using desperate means to correct that. Maddie thinks it’ll be easy – tight dress, heels, less-than-subtle sexual overtures, playing Billy Squier hits for him. But Percy would rather go out to dinner and have a conversation before letting her jump his bones, so Maddie has her work cut out for her. I mean, she’ll have to get to know this kid, which complicates everything. But maybe for the better? Yeah, maybe.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Without giving too much away (even though you’ll probably see it coming, and yes, there’s a pun in this very sentence), there’s a scene here that mirrors one in 1987 Broderick vehicle Biloxi Blues. Otherwise, I’ve already referenced Indecent Proposal, the script itself references Jaws and it comes from a long line of sex comedies including Good Boys, American Pie, Risky Business and the Judd Apatow movies I’ll namedrop in a minute here.

Performance Worth Watching: Without saying a single word, Lawrence, sitting center-frame, shows a shift in character and tone that elevates No Hard Feelings above other films of its ilk. We aren’t surprised by this, are we? That one of Hollywood’s most gifted performers is capable of showing emotional depth and executing spirited physical comedy while totally naked, all in the same movie? Nope. Not surprised at all.

Memorable Dialogue: Maddie barges into bedroom after bedroom at a high-school party, looking for Percy, and also delivering meta-commentary on the lack of sex in movies these days: “Does anyone even f— anymore?”

Sex and Skin: Beyond Full Frontal J-Law, we get bare dude-butt, plenty of raunchy gags and some unseen below-the-sheets action.

Our Take: You also won’t be surprised to learn that without Lawrence’s gung-ho energy, No Hard Feelings would be briefly noted for defying modern norms with its unapologetic ribaldry before it faded into the content landscape. That criticism is perhaps more of an indictment of the increasingly algorithm-driven landscape than the film itself; it plays like Judd Apatow working at about 70 percent of his creative capacity (Knocked Up or The 40-Year-Old Virgin being his benchmark works), which is still far better than the ecru-khaki blehh the streamers churn out weekly. As Stupnitsky’s story – co-scripted with John Philips – plays out, there’s the nagging feeling that it’s not quite reaching its full potential or challenging Lawrence’s abilities, and lacks the nerve to truly test the boundaries of good taste. But context is king, and it feels fresher now than if it had bowed in 2008.

In the moment, however, the J-Law-playing-a-warmish-mess age/experience-divide hot-woman/virgin-dweeb formula works reasonably well to inspire laughs and enough palpable pathos to fill, I dunno, a half-dozen or so sperm-donor cups. It’s not a load, but it’s also not nothing, is what I’m saying (with apologies). Developments get predictably sentimental, but it’s a testament to Lawrence and Barth that they work around some of the material’s simpler emotional beats and generate enough substance to render their characters as something modestly greater than anatomically correct paper dolls. As for the depiction of the late-capitalist social divide? Whatever. Go watch Bait if you want some hard-hitting fishermen-vs.-the-hipsters townies-fight-the-gentrification-invasion conflict. No Hard Feelings puns its ass off right there in the title, so you know when you press play that it’s not going to be anything more than a diversion from whatever’s troubling you right now – and that always has value.

Our Call: No Hard Feelings does what it says on the box – and a little bit more, thanks to Lawrence, but only just a little bit. So STREAM IT, but with modest expectations. 

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.