Few films are as aptly titled as Love Hurts (now streaming on Peacock): you’ll want to love it, but you’ll quickly learn that it ain’t gonna love you back. It has a big huge major thing going for it in Ke Huy Quan, the Goonies and Indiana Jones child star who emerged from retirement to win an Oscar for Everything Everywhere All at Once. Now he finds his record sullied a bit with a headlining slot in a highly dysfunctional Valentine’s Day-themed rom-com action spoof – or whatever it’s trying to be, who can tell? Another recent Oscar winner, Ariana DeBose (West Side Story), follows a pair of duds in Argylle and Kraven the Hunter with, well, another dud which has been getting its ass handed to it by critics. Time to add another L to this movie’s stats!
LOVE HURTS: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?
The Gist: We open with a Quan voiceover, and it’ll soon be clear that this narrative device exists in this movie to clarify a plot that should be simple and concise, but in this case, is the opposite of that. Good work, everybody! Quan plays Marvin Gable, a happy-go-lucky real estate agent. His smiling face is on park benches and all that. He’s employee of the month at the firm. His boss Cliff (Sean Astin, notching a Goonies reunion) loves him. Marvin makes homemade heart-shaped cookies for Valentine’s Day and hands them out at the office. But little do all these people know that he’s a very good and excellent doer of martial arts who used to be a cold-blooded damn killer in the employ of his mobster brother, Knuckles (Daniel Wu).
Once upon a time, Marvin was ordered to kill Rose (DeBose), but he didn’t because he was in love with her. He enabled her escape, then backdoored his way outta the criminal biz and created a new life for himself, a life that he loves. For reasons I cannot discern because the hows and whys and wheres of this screenplay are in shambles, Rose comes to town – maybe just to draw Sharpie mustaches on the Marvin-face park benches? This stirs things up. Her arrival, not the mustaches, although Marvin isn’t fond of them, especially the Hitler one.
Marvin’s just trying to sell yet another cookie-cutter home to some cookie-cutter suburbanites, but he keeps getting attacked by Knuckles’ goons. He fights off a poetry-spouting killer known as The Raven (Mustafa Shakir), and wallops bantering partners King (Marshawn Lynch) and Otis (Andre Eriksen). Joining the array of pointless supporting characters are Knuckles’ shady right hand (Cam Gigandet), Marvin’s rival realtor who knows karate (Drew Scott), a sleazy mob accountant (Rhys Darby), and Marvin’s cynical Eeyore of an assistant Ashley (Lio Tipton), who falls in love with The Raven because of his elegant poetry. Most, if not all, of these people get punched and/or kicked. Needless to say, all this makes it a tad bit difficult for Marvin to keep a lid on his dark past.
What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Director Jonathan Eusebio ports over some of his fight-coordinator stuff from the Bournes and Wicks and tries to render Quan as Jackie Chan circa Rumble in the Bronx.
Performance Worth Watching: Quan is such an amiable, lovable presence both on and off the screen. But there are limitations to his plucky powers, as Love Hurts so depressingly illustrates.
Memorable Dialogue: An exchange between former lovers:
Marvin: I’ve changed, Rose.
Rose: No you haven’t. You’re just hiding.
Sex and Skin: None.
Our Take: Love Hurts occasionally looks nice, and it’s clear that significant effort went into the fight choreography, which has long been Eusebio’s specialty. Other than that, this film is a shambles. It suffers from Too Many Characters Syndrome, the bevy of faces cluttering a movie that’s never even remotely interested in giving them anything memorable to do. Quan, who exudes sunny vibes both on and off the screen, is the wrong guy to play a just-when-I-thought-I-was-out-they-pulled-me-back-in assassin – it’s like casting Elmo as the voice of Darth Vader. And DeBose’s role feels like an afterthought, wedged into the movie haphazardly, so she can stand around and look tough and get paid.
A better screenplay might not have squandered the talents of two talented Oscar winners. To call the plot sloppy is to describe outer space as being a bit roomy. It’s as if Eusebio formulated fight sequences and squeezed bits of story and character into the margins – a maximum-direction/minimal-plot approach that made the first John Wick great because the fights played out with a feel-it-in-your-chest wallop, and because the plot was a simple return-to-form/revenge saga. Curiously, Love Hurts offers a similarly stripped-down plot but an inability to communicate it coherently. There’s a moment when Quan explains via voiceover, “Knuckles only set me free because I promised to kill Rose,” something that should be blatantly obvious at this point halfway through the movie, but strangely, is not.
But, I can hear you thinking, the fights are fun, right? Eh. Eusebio ratatats through the overdirected action sequences in a manner that’s perfunctorily stylish and weirdly bloodless. It culminates with a moronic, ironic celebration of violence set to ‘You’re the First, My Last, My Everything’ by Barry White, even though the protagonist’s name is seemingly engineered to sound like Marvin Gaye. It’s a typically half-assed, quasi-clever comedy maneuver, and an attempt to assert the film’s status as a heartsick love story, despite its inability to ever be emotionally engaging. Eusebio overthought the fight scenes and underthought the plot, and the result is a waste of everybody’s time. Quan deserves better.
Our Call: Ow. SKIP IT.
John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.
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