Film Review: "Hard Feelings" ("Hammerharte Jungs") (2023).

From Netflix and Germany comes Hard Feelings (Hammerharte Jungs). This German comedy film written and directed by Granz Henman. Two best friends go to school together and try to get through their school years. However, during that time they are confronted with embarrassing new urges and their extremely unpleasant feelings for each other.

The film stars Tobias Schäfer, Cosima Henman, Monika Oschek, Tom Beck, Samirah Breuer, Louis Jérôme Wagenbrenner, Vivien König, Lilly Joan Gutzeit, Nhung Hong, Maximilian Schneider, Leander Lesotho, Jasmin Shakeri, Merlin Sandmeyer, Doris Golpashin, Yuna Bennett, Kailas Mahadevan, Axel Stein, and Diana Amft. The whole thing would go down like a peanut butter and marshmallow sandwich, were it not for the lively lead presence of Schäfer and Henman, two young talents who make the movie better than it deserves to be. However, the central characters are so mealy and formless that you hope they'll get hit by a truck or otherwise disappear, replaced by characters with whom you actually want to engage.

Though told in a somewhat cutesy, sock-hop style, the film works well as a film about character that entertains the tween/teen set without preaching at them. Has my heart grown so cold and battle-scarred that I can't allow myself to be completely won over by the film, or is the film such a load of flavorless mush that there's not enough charm for me to embrace? The importance of understanding varying perspectives is always worth communicating, and the film, despite its cloying approach, manages to deliver this idea with a decent amount of sincerity intact. If the feature doesn't latch on to the senses immediately with its sugared claws, it's a long, ugly one-hundred and three minutes of dreadful behavior to endure, waiting for an ending that never arrives. The film takes what could have been a charming coming-of-age story and buries it beneath layers of cinematic overkill that push you away from the film when they should be drawing you in. The latest from Henman is a well-meaning mess that wants to tap into universal experiences of childhood and first love but bogs down in squirm-inducing banalities. Henman was clearly sick the day they taught filmmaking at film school-you show, not tell the audience what's going on. What at first seems sort of clever quickly turns into an exercise in exasperating tedium. Charming little coming-of-age teen romance. It's a shame that a lovely movie that's truly suitable for all teenagers cannot find an audience in the current movie environment. What starts off as a beautifully innocent tale of two teens navigating confusing feelings for one another, is stomped all over by painfully overdone grownup nonsense. This is a slow, pretty, one-dimensional undertaking. The story is free of any real conflict or depth -- it's just kind of big and shiny, not unlike an expensive Hallmark greeting card. That the film isn't insufferably cute is a measure of its integrity. But it still strains to view the world through the eyes of teens without a filter of grown-up cynicism.

Simon says Hard Feelings (Hammerharte Jungs) receives: