Movie Review: Love Hurts

Despite endearing performances in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom and The Goonies when he was a child, actor Ke Huy Quan struggled to find decent work afterwards, only getting sporadic work in middling movies. So, it was nice to see him get a more substantial role in Everything Everywhere All at Once and then receive awards recognition for it. Likewise, I’m happy that the attention that role afforded him has opened up more doors, though it is unfortunate that Love Hurts was behind one of them.

Marvin Gable (Quan) was once one of the most feared assassins in his brother Alvin’s (Daniel Wu) criminal organization, but managed to convince him to let him out and has since become a highly successful real estate agent, working for his close friend Cliff (Sean Astin). When it comes to light that the intended victim of his final job, Rose (Ariana DeBose), is in fact still alive, Alvin sends a series of goons out to find both of them. Marvin doesn’t want to go back to his old ways, but Rose appears and tries to drag him back in, hoping that they can both take care of Alvin once and for all, stirring up old feelings in him that make it hard for him to say no.

It’s a simple enough concept and one that sounds like it should work on paper, but the execution is so lackluster that it often hurts to sit through. The quality of the performances varies throughout, but only DeBose’s could accurately be described as “good”. Quan certainly tries his best, but he is woefully miscast here, only really working during the fight sequences. The romance between the two is supposedly central to the story but is so thinly sketched out that it would require the actors in the roles to have an enormous amount of chemistry, which unfortunately is not the case at all here. At no time did I believe that these characters had even met before, let alone that they were each secretly in love with each other.

The fight sequences are exciting to watch, with impressive choreography and imaginatively ludicrous ideas, which makes sense given director Jonathan Eusebio’s stunt work on 80 films. Alas, the script by Matthew Murray, Josh Stoddard, and Luke Passmore gives Eusebio and the cast very little to work with, barely bothering to develop any of the characters or plot points. That the trio don’t seem to agree on exactly what kind of movie they’re making further muddles things. It features too many unsuccessful attempts at comedy to work as a straight action thriller and has too much mean-spirited violence to work as a comedy. Perhaps they were aiming for the sort of cool genre mashups that Quentin Tarantino or Guy Ritchie can pull off, but the end result is kind of a mess.

Some friends and I were discussing which recent movies were truly enhanced by watching them on a big screen in a theater, with Wicked and Nosferatu both coming up as examples of those that are. Love Hurts on the other hand might best be viewed from a completely separate room. ★