Jennifer Lawrence’s ‘No Hard Feelings’ Fails To Find Target Audience

Jennifer Lawrence has struggled to find her place within the industry ever since her meal ticket in ‘The Hunger Games’ franchise ended its run. 

After shaking off her sketchy ties to Harvey Weinstein and being propelled into super stardom over a very short period of time, it seems like Hollywood can’t decide if the former X-Men actress is a franchise star, an Oscar-winning artist, or just box office poison.

Lawrence has been in some pretty awful films in recent years. ‘Red Sparrow’ was a critically panned mess, ‘Mother!’ was a film adored by critics but hated by audiences, and Passengers did not gain the admiration of moviegoers alongside Chris Pratt. As a result of these failures, Lawrence took a two-year break from acting in 2019, but that didn’t stop the A-lister from regularly putting her foot in her mouth.

Lawrence has begun to repel audiences away with her public comments and now she’s now taken to starring and producing in her own film projects to stay afloat. 

‘No Hard Feelings’ is an R-rated sex comedy that many questioned if the premise had been allowed had the gender roles been flipped. In the film, stars Lawrence as Maddie Barker, a 32-year-old Uber driver living in upstate New York who one day finds that her car and only source of income has been repossessed.

As Maddie is on the verge of losing her house, she stumbles upon a Craigslist ad from an older couple offering up a car to any woman willing to sleep with their young son Percy (Andrew Barth Feldman), who they fear is not adapting properly to adult life.

Taking up their offer with the aim of dating Percy just long enough to get the car, Maddie soon finds that the more time she spends with him, the more she begins to actually like him. Not romantically, but Maddie does come to realize that she’s taking advantage of a teenager with a good heart for selfish reasons.

One of the biggest issues with Hollywood is their ability to believe they can have their cake and eat it too. The age of the ‘1980s sex comedy’ has been dead for quite some time, and it’s Hollywood that killed it. Modern progressivism Hollywood promotes as pushed the narrative that these types of films are problematic because they appealed to ‘The Male Gaze’ and used women’s bodies for laughs.

At the same time, Hollywood wants to revive that same genre by using Lawrence as the vehicle to make it ‘acceptable’ in the eyes of progressive ideology. Unfortunately, they made a film that has no idea who its target market is.

‘No Hard Feelings’ wants to appeal to the nostalgia of old school sex comedies but with a progressive slant, but that audience doesn’t exist. Genre fans (aka men) don’t want to see Lawrence lead a gender-flipped subversion of the films that provided them with any number of laughs throughout their adolescence.

Meanwhile, “modern” women don’t want to see a film of this nature because they have been told to view these types of movies as inherently ‘bad’ or offensive. In other words, this movie doesn’t have an audience.

Jennifer Lawrence does a solid job of trying to shake up her image, even going so far as to do a full-frontal nudity scene that’s played up as one of the biggest comedic moments of the entire movie.

Meanwhile, Feldman’s performance is a good microcosm of the film itself, standing as the physical embodiment of the film’s ‘awkward’ style of comedy. The premise of ‘No Hard Feelings’ is one that’s held together by 10 cents and dreams as it ends up clashing with the film’s desire to stay grounded in the realm of reality.

The film never pretends to be an over the top cartoonish comedy, so you can’t throw logic out of the window and accept ‘No Hard Feelings‘ for what it wants to be. Thanks to Hollywood’s continued infantilization of society through the medium of modern entertainment, the film forces itself to ride the line of ‘being wholesome’ and has to be called out for what it is.

As a movie, ‘No Hard Feelings’ is a mixed bag in terms of entertainment and as a result it is not going to please everyone, if not anyone at all.

See or Skip: ‘No Hard Feelings’ is a subpar comedy that comes with alot of baggage much like the lead actress. 

Edited by Alberto Arellano and Kyana Jeanin Rubinfeld