No Hard Feelings review – sporadically amusing Jennifer Lawrence romp

Maddie (Jennifer Lawrence) has already had her car repossessed (it didn’t help that an aggrieved ex-boyfriend worked for the debt collection agency). And now she’s on the brink of losing her beloved home, a chocolate-box cottage on the Montauk coast that she inherited from her late mother. Then she spots a Craigslist advert – a wealthy couple seek a young woman to take their socially maladroit 19-year-old son in hand (as it were), teaching him the ways of the world before he heads to Princeton. It’s the kind of premise that seems more in tune with a certain kind of crass, oversexed 80s teen comedy than with contemporary cinematic mores. But the generational disconnect and the toe-curling awkwardness of 32-year-old Maddie’s seduction assault on poor, terrified Percy (Andrew Barth Feldman, all elbows and uncertainty) are rather the point of this sporadically amusing but instantly forgettable romp. The unstoppable force of Lawrence’s charisma notwithstanding, this is not so much tasteless, just a bit bland.