“No Hard Feelings” Delivers Easy Laughs

Those with a craving for a summer comedy will enjoy “No Hard Feelings.” Written and directed by Gene Stupnitsky, “No Hard Feelings” isn’t flashy but has a sure hand behind the camera. Lawrence hits a home run as Maddie, an Uber diver without a car. She spots an ad for a Buick, but it comes with a catch: She must agree to deflower the owner’s nerdy 19-year-old son.

Lawrence’s confident performance allows her to show off a knack for comic timing not seen previously.  Best known for playing Katniss in “The Hunger Games” and Mystique in Marvel’s “X-Men” movies, Lawrence won the 2012 Best Actress Oscar as Tiffany in “Silver Linings Playbook,” but she has never done a flat-out comedy. That an Academy-Award winner would be okay with a scene where she wrestles naked might seem like a step back. But that scene has a lot of laughs, and “No Hard Feelings” serves as a declaration of freedom by an actress that she can do whatever she wants and do it well.

Stupnitsky, who was born in Ukraine and grew up in Chicago, was bar mitzvahed, and has an impressive resume. On TV, he wrote and directed for “The Office,” and created two series: 2014’s fish out of water comedy “Hello, Ladies,” and “Jury Duty,” a combination sitcom and reality show currently streaming on Freevee. He wrote the 2009 Jack Black caveman comedy, “Year One,” and “Bad Teacher,” a 2011 hit starring Cameron Diaz, and  in 2019 wrote and directed “Good Boys,” a preteen farce.

“No Hard Feelings” is a story of two people who are radically different but have some things in common. Andrew Barth Feldman, who stars opposite Lawrence as Percy, the virginal teenager, shows shades of Jesse Eisenberg and Michael Cera. In a nod to the raunchy R-rated comedies of the 1990s, Stupnitsky lifts a gag from “American Pie.”

Feldman deserves praise for his first major feature film role, while Lawrence continues to show her versatility. Their chemistry is put to especially good use in a scene involving Hall and Oates “Maneater” as Maddie fights back tears.  “No Hard Feelings” is a well-executed film that may in a small way fight the stigma that comedies are of lesser artistic value than dramas.