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Film of the Week Helicopter parenting gone wrong

MARIA DUARTE is disappointed by a comedy that doesn’t cut it, despite laudable efforts by its cast

No Hard Feelings (15)
Directed by Gene Stupnitsky

ON the verge of losing her childhood home, Maddie (Jennifer Lawrence), a 32-year-old woman, answers an usual ad in which wealthy helicopter parents want to hire someone to “date” their 19-year-old son and bring him out of his shell before he leaves for college, in exchange for a Buick Regal car in this gross-out comedy by Gene Stupnitsky (Good Boys).

It is difficult to come to terms with this film’s disturbing premise, particularly as, if the sexes were reversed, it would never have got made.

So why is it acceptable for a teenage boy to be pawed over and be made a man by a much older woman?

For dating him also includes taking his virginity which his rich and clueless parents (played by Matthew Broderick and Laura Benanti) are completely on board with.

Oscar-winner and the film’s producer Lawrence, in her first comedy role to date, gives a knockout performance as the fierce Maddie.

She is an Uber driver/bar maid who having her car and livelihood repossessed is unable to pay her rising local taxes and when faced with her house being taken away agrees to date the introverted and socially awkward Percy (a phenomenal Andrew Barth Feldman).

Lawrence and Feldman have enormous on-screen chemistry together as they take part in jaw-dropping laugh-out-loud moments as Maddie goes to ever-increasing lengths to seal the deal. These include Percy macing her and holding buck naked onto windscreen wipers as she drives at neck-break speed.

Meanwhile a full-frontal naked Lawrence confronting teens on the beach who have stolen her and Percy’s clothes seems a gratuitous and cheap shot and frankly she deserved better.

The film, which is inspired by a real-life advert in Craigslist, also examines the gentrification of Maddie’s home town Montauk, New York, where the wealthy descend in the summer, buying up all the properties thus pushing up house and tax prices and ousting the locals out because they can no longer afford to live there.

While Lawrence shows off her comic chops, the film does not hit the right balance tone-wise. It is hard to get past its premise.

Out in cinemas now.

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