IN RETROSPECT...JENNIFER LAWRENCE - Spoiler Free Reviews

Greatness 🤩

Greatness Adjacent

Goodness 😊

What the f*** is this garbage? 🤮

For the 5th chapter of this series, I wanted to cover an actress who was one of the five biggest stars in the entire industry by the age of 23. Someone whose public persona has been kinda low-key in the past couple of years, in which time she is done a varying amount of diverse projects that are worth noting…

Jennifer Shrader Lawrence

For what it’s worth, Jennifer Lawrence still may be the most bankable actress in all of Hollywood. But unlike her male counterparts, who seemingly just look for the next franchise to latch on to for maximum dollars, Lawrence has always been someone whose resume proves that she goes for more artistic and heavily emotional films in most cases.

A couple of things first, tho…

These are covering the films that are most important when discussing the legacy of Jennifer Lawrence. She’s done quite a few films that really don’t matter when it comes to discussing the impact she’s had, so the films will not be covered here. Those films are as follows:

*A Beautiful Planet (Documentary that she narrated)
*Everything before Winter’s Bone
*Like Crazy
*The Beaver
*House at the End of the Street

Some of these films are pretty good, but ultimately they’re not because of reasons involving Lawrence; also, they are not films that most people even remember she was in.

Anywho, without further ado, here is…

THE JENNIFER LAWRENCE TIER LIST!!

GREATNESS 🤩

WINTER'S BONE

The 2010 Oscar race for Best Actress was a pretty tough one. There were at least three ladies that deserve to win the award, and one of those ladies was Lawrence, who was by far the youngest out of the three. It should be said, however, that this is a performance that would get a nomination in literally every other year this decade considering who was nominated for this award in the upcoming years. This is my favorite performance of hers.

SILVER LININGS PLAYBOOK

A superior romantic comedy if you choose to see it as a romantic comedy. (I've had debates on this, actually) Everything that moviegoers have come to admire about J. Law over the years is all here. David Russell is a man who only has a handful of very good films in my humble opinion, and Lawrence is the anchor for damn near all of them. She is the Diane Keaton to his Woody Allen.

Greatness adjacent

X-MEN: FIRST CLASS and X-MEN: DAYS OF FUTURE PAST

I'm going to pair these two together because they are the top five X-Men movies in their own right, and they represent a pretty miraculous reinvention of this franchise. In these movies, Lawrence is a key supporting character and proves that she can be exactly that without hogging up most of the attention on the screen. Her Mystique is vastly superior to Rebecca Romijn's version, and I think that should go without saying, but I'm going to say it anyway.

CAUSEWAY

I really, really cannot comprehend how Lawrence didn't get an Oscar nomination for this film, considering that list of nominees this year. (De Armas, and Riseborough? Really, people?) This is not a very movie-star type role for her, and she is very quietly powerful in her portrayal. This is a top-five performance for her, in my opinion.

GOOD 😊

HUNGER GAMES and CATCHING FIRE

These are pretty good tent poles in a very average kind of way. They aren't really dynamic in their presentation, but they're very good at establishing that Jennifer Lawrence is an absolute f****** movie star. For a long while, there was a direct comparison with Shailene Woodley when it came to who was "better". Woodley had the divergent franchise, which wasn't all that bad, but oddly seemed kind of small time in comparison to the flashy big studio blockbuster type s*** that the hunger games franchise shelled out in comparison. These films don't work without J. Law. It perhaps doesn't work with anyone else besides her.

PASSENGERS

Almost everything worked with passengers. It's a technically superior film with great cinematography and CGI. It has two very good performances from Lawrence and Chris Pratt. The problem was the story. This movie was way too serious. Pratt and Lawrence should do something again that's a little bit lighter in tone because the times of the film that aren't trying to be dark and romantic are the times when you can look at the two of them together and think of comedic chemistry more than anything.

MEH...

MOTHER!

A very pretentious film in every right. Darren Aronofsky is truly brilliant, but this film reeks of self-indulgence as it continues Aronofsky's anti-religious crusade that nobody asked him to go upon. Without the top five Jennifer Lawrence performances that she gives in this film, we'd be talking about this film worse than we already do. Some people feel this is genius, and some do not. But uniformly, I think we can all agree that Lawrence holds it down here impressively.

NO HARD FEELINGS

(SEE REVIEW HERE)

JOY

I swear I don't hate David O. Russell. I really don't. But it became apparent about halfway through the first act of this film that (like quite a few other films of his) didn't have a lot to say. Style over substance. The thing that gives this movie weight and the thing that keeps it from being a completely boring snore fest is Jennifer Lawrence hitting all of the three-pointers at all of the clutch times. True movie stars can do that sort of thing.

AMERICAN HUSTLE

American hustle is the most overhyped movie of all of the 2010s. This is often seen as the David O. Russell masterpiece that should go into the Smithsonian capsule. Jennifer Lawrence's character in this movie is the character that she had from silver linings playbook basically just turned all the way up to 11, in a different time period. That being said, she is a highlight of this film, although not the best part about it.

MOCKINGJAY - PART 1 and MOCKINGJAY - PART 2

All Y.A. (young adult) films tend to have this kind of a franchise comedown to close things out. Like twilight, Harry potter, and the divergent series, this is yet another two-part closeout scenario that is all very predictable, and soft and its execution. Lawrence tries her best to make the love triangle thing that is in so many Y.A. films entertaining, and she's so good she almost pulls it off. Almost.

What the f*** is this garbage? 🤮

SERENA

Serena is one of those movies where everything is done well, but it is boring as all of f***. Sometimes a movie can get everything right on paper and then add up to absolutely positively nothing on the screen. Lawrence is fine, Bradley Cooper is fine, and the direction by Susanne Bier is fine, but the movie itself is...not that whatsoever. I tried watching this twice just to force myself to like it, but I just couldn't. You could probably get a full night's sleep off of a 5-mile jog by watching this mixture of audio and visual NyQuil. It's that uneventful.

DON'T LOOK UP

This is super pretentious cinema at its worst. This is a wasted and humongous cast filled with legends and a disastrous third act that is so bad that even a really good Jennifer Lawrence performance is just a minor footnote. Hate this movie with all of my soul.

RED SPARROW

I get with this movie was trying to do, but in all honesty, Lawrence is kind of miscast here. I don't know who you would cast for something like this, but J. Law shouldn't have been the one. The story was way too complicated for its own good and heavy-handed most of the way. There are scenes with J. Law's character that are kind of incredible but instantaneously forgettable at the same time.

THOSE LAST TWO X-MEN MOVIES...X-MEN: apocalypse and DARK PHOENIX

These are not only the worst X-Men movies on record; these are two of the worst comic book movies that have ever, ever, existed. I've had many conversations with individuals who will try and name comic book movies that are worse than X-MEN: apocalypse and dark phoenix, but when we get into real in-depth descriptions of why these films are horrible, they all kind of end up agreeing with me.

J. LAW's CINEMATIC APOGEE

Consistency is key when it comes to mentioning the career of Jennifer Lawrence. If I haven't gotten through the message by now, I will say it flat out... She's rarely bad. Even in the films she's in that are bad, she is rarely something that adds to the ineptitude that is going on on screen.

I don't know what her greatest individual cinematic moment was. I don't know if something sticks out more than the rest of the consistency that she's already done, so I'm going to go with my favorite scene of hers, which is THIS HERE:

***************

One of the biggest movie stars around as I came of age was Julia Roberts. I was 8 years old when pretty woman came out, and by the time I really started getting into movies, she was already a supernova-level box office attraction for that time. Not that Roberts was overrated or anything like that, but for the longest time, I couldn't figure out what it was that made people want to pay money to go and see her in rom-com after rom-com after rom-com. However, I have a better idea of why that was now more than I ever did.

Lawrence (like Roberts) has the ability to draw in an audience through sheer charisma. Lawrence (like Roberts) plays characters that are likable, and relatable most of the time, and her performances are award-worthy more often than we would like to think. Lawrence (like Roberts) carries the mantle of a movie star rather effortlessly and seems to have a handle on fame that very few people who are as famous as she is. It'll be interesting to see if she can bring the R-rated sex comedy back... But if anybody can pull it off, it is J. Law.