Why on God’s green earth did Jennifer Lawrence choose the low, low bar R-rated sex farce “No Hard Feelings” to do full-frontal nudity in is beyond me. A classy, artsy movie, ok, but a comedy about a 32-year-old woman who seduces a nerdy high school boy in order to get a Buick as payment from his helicopter parents, so he’ll be prepared for girls at Princeton? Where’s the discernment? This is Oscar-winner Jennifer Lawrence we’re talking about. Also Katniss in “Hunger Games.” She can’t need the money this badly.
Was she maybe convinced by the fact that the surface veneer of raunch hides a caramel-y, Hallmark-y heart that “redeems” it? Maybe the jokes looked good on the page, and since J-Law can do comedy with the best of the A-list actresses—she just couldn’t resist?
Cougar
Maddie (Lawrence) is a Montauk, New York, Uber driver and bartender with lots of jilted ex-boyfriends, one of whom delightedly repossesses her car one fine morning. While trying to re-seduce said ex to get him to leave her car alone, in her bathrobe, a young Italian man comes out of her house in his Speedo underwear to do some stretching. She claims this is her cousin. Her bartender tips won’t pay the taxes on the house she inherited from her mother, so that’ll be the next thing to go.
Wait, There’s More!
The film’s first swerve into schmaltz finds Percy and Maddie (both of whom never went to prom) dressing up to go to an upscale restaurant. And, per Percy’s parent’s hopes that she find ways to get him out of his shell, insists that he go play the restaurant piano, where he unexpectedly sings the heck out of Hall and Oates’s “Maneater.” I bet you didn’t know that a cougar is a man-eating cat.But at some point, Percy perceives her perfidious intentions, and hies himself to a teen party for snooty Princeton matriculators and commences his foray into the collegiate party life.
Knowing he’ll be no good at that whatsoever, Maddie comes to his rescue, whereupon the drunk Percy accidentally punches her in the neck. After which, we get the naked reconciliation moonlight skinny-dip where their clothes get stolen, and J-Law emerges like Venus on the half-shell to do naked beach barfighting and what appears to be naked jiu-jitsu, with the clothes thieves.
That’s Probably Enough Synopsis
Let’s put it this way—if I hadn’t been on the job, I’d have walked out. Right after Italian Speedo guy. Back in the day, Susan Sarandon’s Nora Baker in “White Palace,” and Jennifer Coolidge’s Stifler’s mom in “American Pie” cougars were fun. Granted, Anne Bancroft’s Mrs. Robinson from “The Graduate” was depressing to watch and she was cruel, but the film did reveal societal cracks and the problems with the sexual revolution.
Where was I? Oh yeah: Can you imagine a male movie star currently playing a prostitute paid by parents to have sex with their virginal pubescent daughter? Even if it was funny, it would blow our collective minds. To borrow my last line from my “The Flash” review: “The global moral dye-vat darkens daily due to the deluge of demonic detritus.”
