No Hard Feelings: The Return of JLaw and 2000s Rom-Com

I love this movie so much. It has been a while since I haven’t watched any comedy in the theater. Many blockbusters like The Flash, Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse, Elemental, or Transformer: Rise of the Beasts are in the theater. But I am not a big fan of those types of movies. I am looking for something easy to watch that makes me relaxed. Then, I chose to see No Hard Feelings. I watched the trailer and thought it would be one of the best summer movies this year. And I was right. No Hard Feelings is a rom-com movie, my favorite genre after noir. It usually tells stories about weird relationships where two people meet under awkward circumstances. They often don’t like each other at first, they fight over each other, and finally, in the climax, there will be something happens that makes them understand and fall in love. Rom-com doesn’t have many jokes like comedy. It has funny dialogues between characters that make the audience laugh. Usually, the material to make the audience laugh is the collection of what happened in daily life, and they bring that material into a script and turn it into a movie. That’s amazing! Nowadays, romcom is not a popular genre like it used to be in the 2000s. But thanks to No Hard Feelings, romcom is back in the game.

Source: IMDb

No Hard Feelings follows the story of a girl named Maddie Barker, who is in front of the brink of losing her home and is hired to be a friend of a 19-year-old boy, Percy, by his parents. They will reward her with a car if she makes Percy more confident in life before he goes to college. In front of the danger of losing her house and just losing her car, Maddie agrees. But she can never know what awaits her when she gets too close to Percy. The movie is probably predictable, especially with all the fans of rom-coms. However, even though I can guess what happens next, the film makes me laugh and enjoy every second. The plot is straightforward. But the performances of every character are a strength that makes this movie outstanding. The script sticks to the 2000s romcom, but it has the breath of today, which means there are trends and jokes that all of us can understand they are talking about. That is the best equation to make a rom-com.

Jennifer Lawrence is back in the game. Maybe you may have known her from The Hunger Games trilogy, X-Men, Silver Lining Playbook, or recently with Don’t Look Up. She has proved that she is the Queen of Romcom. I used to watch Silver Lining Playbook, which brought her the first Oscar of her career. Her performance in that movie is so superb. She acted like she didn’t act. It was very life-like that we could be like her in real life. Her character, Tiffany, had an unstable mentality, but it didn’t stop her from being who she was. She could do anything without thinking about what people thought of her or being afraid of being humiliated. Return to No Hard Feelings, Jennifer Lawrence becomes a young woman struggling with her life. All she wants is money to save the house her mother gave her. She doesn’t need many fancy dialogues to say. Besides, she has the strength of facial expression and voice change. She only needs to act it out; it is enough to entertain people.

When a wealthy family offers her a job to help their son, Percy, out of his comfort zone before he goes to college, Maddie finds her gold mine because it is her forte. She asks Percy’s parents if they want to date Percy in a normal voice or date Percy by emphasizing the word “date.” The parents say hilariously that date him hard. That is funny, and the audiences have to understand it to laugh. Maddie faces the most challenging case of her life because Percy is not a normal boy. Deep inside, he is a bad boy, but his parents are too overprotective of him that he cannot do anything he wants. Maddie understands that to make this boy more confident, she has to bring the bad boy inside Percy out of him. Maddie has tried to make love with Percy multiple times, and Percy doesn’t flinch a bit. With him, he only has the feeling to do it if he is in love. When Maddie finally can understand him, it is the time she realizes he is not the person who she should help, it is herself. Maddie has tried to get the past out of her life but can’t; something is even bigger than she thought. Percy is there to help her realize that. Jennifer Lawrence has a beautiful performance as Maddie. It has shown that even though she plays a 30 girl, it doesn’t show that she is 30 years old. It is like she is a teenage girl who wants to have fun. She can live her youth one more time and try things she had never done when she was young.

No Hard Feelings is the best choice this summer for anyone looking for something fresh other than action or superhero movies. I can guarantee that this movie will make you laugh in every scene. Highly recommend!