No Hard Feelings: Not so sure about that

No Hard Feelings (2023) • View trailer

Three stars (out of five). Rated R, for sexual content, graphic nudity, brief drug use and relentless profanity

Available via: Movie theaters

By Derrick Bang • Published in The Davis Enterprise, 6.23.23

Director Gene Stupnitsky’s bawdy entry can’t decide what it wants to be.

 

At times, it displays the energetic, no-holds-barred raunch typical of classics such as The 40-Year-Old Virgin, Bridesmaids and There’s Something About Mary. A scrappy beach fight scene here is the stuff of cinema legend.

 

After an enjoyable day at the local boardwalk, Maddie (Jennifer Lawrence) is
delighted by the prize that Percy (Andrew Barth Feldman) has won for her.

But at other times we’re expected to empathize with the two primary characters as authentic people, with credible feelings and angst.

It’s almost impossible to achieve both goals; the former too frequently undercuts the latter … particularly given the mean-spiritedness of Stupnitsky and John Phillips’ script. The line between funny and cruel is very thin, and this film too frequently slides onto the wrong side.

 

Maddie Barker (Jennifer Lawrence), a longtime resident of the Long Island village of Montauk, is appalled by how incoming rich jerks have transformed her community. Rising property taxes are threatening the house in which she grew up, and which holds the memory of her late mother. Maddie’s jobs as bar maid and Uber driver no longer keep up with the bills, and — as this story begins — her car is repossessed by former short-term lover Gary (Ebon Moss-Bachrach).

 

Now reduced to getting around on roller skates, and lacking the additional Uber income, the situation rapidly becomes even more dire. Then Maddie is alerted to an unusual Craigslist job listing from wealthy helicopter parents seeking somebody to “date” their introverted 19-year-old son, and bring him out of his shell before he leaves for Princeton in the fall. The payment: a free Buick Regal.

 

The quotation marks around the word “date” are telling.

 

Although the set-up smells uncomfortably like pimping, Maddie is desperate … and pragmatic; her love life has been limited to a long string a short-timers and one-night stands. How different could this be?

 

She therefore arranges to meet Laird and Allison Becker (Matthew Broderick and Laura Benanti, both deadpan hilarious), who live in a cluelessly privileged world. Their son, Percy (Andrew Barth Feldman), has no friends, rarely leaves his room, and hasn’t learned to drive; his parents worry that Princeton will eat him alive.

 

Although their ad specified a woman in her “young 20s,” Maddie argues that her 32-year-old self is guaranteed to be “more sensitive” to the situation. (Lawrence is indeed 32.) Laird and Allison accept this rationale, and caution that Percy must never know about the arrangement. (Well, no kidding.) They explain that he volunteers at a local animal shelter, and suggest that Maddie visit as a potential dog adopter.

 

At which point, this film goes off the rails for the first time (and certainly not the last).

Halloween Kills: Send it to an early grave

Halloween Kills (2021) • View trailer

One star (out of five). Rated R, for strong gory violence, grisly images, profanity and drug use

Available via: Movie theaters

By Derrick Bang

What. A. Stinker.

 

Unless I’m missing one, this is the 12th entry in the undead franchise that began with 1978’s Halloween, a modest little shocker that still out-performs all of its descendants.

 

Having barely survived what they felt was their final encounter with the murderous
Michael Myers (hah!), Karen (Judy Greer, left) and Allyson (Andi Matichak, right)
rush a badly wounded Laurie (Jamie Lee Curtis) to the hospital.

The series has been wholly re-invented at least twice, and Jamie Lee Curtis’ Laurie Strode has been killed the same number of times … only to be resurrected by subsequent filmmakers anxious for her dwindling fan cred, who explained this away by insisting, “Oh, that one (or those several) didn’t count.”

Even by such increasingly contrived standards, in a textbook case of rapidly diminishing returns, director David Gordon Green’s Halloween Kills is an insufferable waste of time.

 

For starters, Curtis’ top-billed credit is a bait-and-switch; her Laurie Strode is present for only five, perhaps 10 minutes … and she spends the majority of that time moaning in a hospital bed.

 

Instead, our nominal “heroes” are Laurie’s daughter Karen (Judy Greer) and granddaughter Allyson (Andi Matichak), returning from 2018’s Halloween, the most recent re-boot, which kicked off a trilogy that’ll conclude (yeah, right) with next year’s Halloween Ends.

 

And while it’s nice that Green — along with co-writers Scott Teems and Danny McBride — have name-checked characters and events from John Carpenter’s 1978 classic, it would have been even better if they’d written a coherent script. Seriously, nothing that happens in this misbegotten flick makes any sense — except as a means to set up another welter of gory deaths — and every character’s dialogue is random, hysterical gibberish.

 

So okay: It’s fun to see the now-adult Kyle Richards, reprising her role as Lindsey Wallace, one of the kids Laurie babysat back in 1978; and Nancy Stephens, as Marion Chambers, the nurse accompanying Donald Pleasance’s Samuel Loomis (also glimpsed in fleeting flashbacks); and Charles Cyphers, as Haddonfield’s former Sheriff Leigh Brackett, who lost his daughter during the masked Michael Myers’ initial rampage.

 

But it would have been even more fun, if this new film gave them something intelligent to do.

 

Sigh.

 

By way of quick recap, the 2018 film concluded as Laurie, Karen and Allyson cleverly trapped Michael in a long-planned basement dungeon, and then set the entire house on fire. At long last, the demise of Michael Myers, right?

 

Of course not.