Jennifer Lawrence is a terrific comic actor. Look no further than American Hustle in which she was so fantastic I expected to see her cast in one rowdy comedy after another. But that was ten years ago now, and it hasn’t happened. Not even Lawrence’s many witty interviews have led to the all-out comic roles she was clearly born to play.

So I went to see No Hard Feelings to finally see Lawrence do a straight-up comedy. Film and TV writer-director Gene Stupnitsky (Jury Duty, Bad Teacher, The Office) wrote the lead role in No Hard Feelings with Lawrence in mind, so he gets points for that, at least. Because she’s great, as expected, though the movie is not.

Like so many films these days, it goes off the rails badly after a promising start. In hard times like these, it seems especially awful that almost nobody can do a decent comedy anymore. Hard to believe that Hollywood once had such a great comedy tradition, with slapstick geniuses led by Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin dominating the silent film era and the incredible triad of directors — Ernst Lubitsch, Preston Sturges, and Billy Wilder — churning out brilliant films for thirty-some years in the studio era.