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No Hard Feelings trailer YouTube.png

Trailer: 'No Hard Feelings,' the New Raunchy Jennifer Lawrence Comedy Looks Quite Bad

By Kayleigh Donaldson | Film | March 9, 2023 |

By Kayleigh Donaldson | Film | March 9, 2023 |


No Hard Feelings trailer YouTube.png

Jennifer Lawrence has long been prized for her charm and humor, but her roles don’t always offer the best opportunities for her to showcase that charisma. After taking a backseat from the A-List for a couple of years to unwind and have a baby, Lawrence is slowly returning to the spotlight with a few high-profile projects. Her next big release is No Hard Feelings, a raunchy comedy that’ll put her front and center as a funny megastar. It’s a good idea on paper and we’re all for comedies getting some real box office love as the genre becomes increasingly side-lined by studios. But wow, this film looks quite bad.



Co-written and directed by Gene Stupnitsky, No Hard Feelings follows a perennial screw-up who answers a Craigslist ad placed by a set of meddling parents looking for someone to date (or ‘date’) their sheltered son before he goes to college. It’s a raunchy Bad Teacher-esque set-up, which makes sense given that the director also wrote that film. If this concept sounds vaguely familiar, maybe you saw the ‘viral story’ of someone offering a car in exchange for a ‘date’ for their son. That was promo for No Hard Feelings.



The whole thing feels weirdly dated, right? Like, this is the kind of comedy that would have polluted the release calendar in the mid-2000s in an attempt to cash in on the Frat Pack-to-Apatow bros pipeline. The jokes seem stale, half the cast looks asleep, and Lawrence looks ill at ease in this sort of brash role. It seems like something you’d do for the cash, but Lawrence’s own company is producing it? That whole set-up of some parents wanting their dorky loser son to get laid is straight out of an ’80s sex comedy. Doing it in 2023 seems lazy at best and downright ridiculous at worst.

Lawrence got a weird bad rap during the height of her fame as being a try-hard because her ‘relatable’ image started to sour with a lot of people. She took a step back from the endless headlines and now she’s back with a firmer hand on her persona and career. She’s not stuck in a major franchise anymore, she’s got her own production company, and the likes of Lynne Ramsay and Paolo Sorrentino are lining up to work with her. She’s got the clout to do anything, so I get why she’d be like, ‘let’s make a dumb, broad, profanity-filled comedy with a hard-R rating.’ We don’t have a lot of films like this on the landscape now. That’s a good and bad thing. We need more variety in cinemas, but I’m not sure this sort of retrograde throwback is exactly vital.

Perhaps the film is better than the trailer suggests, but I don’t have high hopes for No Hard Feelings.