Lisa Johnson Mandell’s No Hard Feelings review finds glorious guilty pleasure in the summer’s raunchy romcom starring the transcendent Jennifer Lawrence.

The beach. Jennifer Lawrence. Awkward romance. Naughty fun. Sounds like a raucous summer romcom to me!

It’s a tale that could have taken place any time in the last 40 years, give or take a few details, hence Boomers, Millennials, Gen Z, etc. can relate to it and laugh at it. Lawrence plays Maddie, a comely Uber driver/bartender in her early 30’s, just trying to make ends meet in the increasingly gentrified beach community of Montauk, Long Island.

When her car is repossessed because she can’t pay the property taxes on the home her mother left her, she finds herself without the means to earn the money to satisfy her debtors.

…Until she sees a strange ad online. It seems a wealthy local couple is looking for someone to “date” their withdrawn, nebbish son Percy over the summer, so he will come out of his shell before he goes to college in in the fall. Payment is a used Plymouth, just what Maddie needs when she needs it.

Not being the most subtle or sophisticated girl in the room, she believes blatant, artless seduction tactics will win him over in a heartbeat. But it turns out he has such a big heart beating in his narrow chest that she’ll have to try a lot harder than that, and, as anticipated, many an outrageously awkward moment will be had and many a lesson will be learned.

Along the way we’ll see some surprising performances by Matthew Broderick, as Percy’s helicopter dad, Ebon Moss-Bachrach (The Bear) as one of Maddie’s many exes, Natalie Morales as Maddie’s pregnant best friend, and of course Lawrence, whose slapstick humor turns out to be timeless—Lawrence precipitously navigating an massive concrete staircase in rollerblades harkens back to Laurel and Hardy’s famous The Piano Movers. Hapless staircase scenes never grow old.

Director Gene Stupnitsky (Good Boys, Bad Teacher) may be a bit puerile, but isn’t that the essence of teen-ish comedies? Isn’t there a good deal of guilty pleasure in laughing at the outrageously uncomfortable things we’re not supposed to?

I’d advise grabbing your bestie, ordering a frothy, fruity cocktail or mocktail at the theater bar, and settling in for 103 minutes of raunchy laughs guarantied to tighten your abs a notch or two. There are worse ways to spend a summer eve.

Rated R

1 Hour 43 Minutes

If this No Hard Feelings review encourages you to run right out to the cineplex, get times and tickets at Fandango.com.

Lisa Johnson Mandell’s No Hard Feelings review finds glorious guilty pleasure in the summer’s raunchy romcom starring the transcendent Jennifer Lawrence.