Former child star, forever Goonie, and Academy Award-winner Ke Huy Quan logs his first leading role in Love Hurts, an action…comedy?...set during Valentine’s Day.
Quan plays the perfectly named Marvin Gable, a Milwaukee realtor selling McMansions to McBoring people. But Marvin relishes the mundanity of his life, he loves being a realtor and his nerdy, be-sweatered enthusiasm for “putting people in homes” is endearing as an act-one meet cute for the hero in an action movie. Love Hurts is built on the John Wick premise of having a beloved actor play a seemingly normal guy with a dark past—the film is also produced by 87North, the production company co-founded by John Wick co-director David Leitch—but that is where the similarities end because, unfortunately, Love Hurts well, hurts. One might even say it scars.
None of it is Quan’s fault. The years between his childhood stardom and 2020s resurrection were filled with stunt work, including working as a stunt coordinator, and it shows in his physicality. Quan is clearly inspired by Jackie Chan, he moves with a similar style and sense of rhythm, reliably finding comedic beats with his body. He also understands the charm of watching a person with a slight build take on much bigger adversaries, and again, leans into the inherent visual humor of his mismatched bouts. Perhaps Ke Huy Quan should just direct himself in an action movie?
But Love Hurts is directed by Jonathan Eusebio, who has no matching sense of style or rhythm. Himself a product of stunt coordination and the John Wick School of Cinema, Eusebio makes his directorial debut with Love Hurts and it appears that once handed total control of the frame he simply doesn’t trust the stunts to be enough. Some scenes are too long, others have too many cuts, the camera sometimes seems to float in space, dislocating physical action from any sense of reality. There is no rhythm or even momentum in Love Hurts, for a film that runs a mere 83 minutes, it drags and hiccups its way through the action scenes.
It doesn’t stop at the direction, though. Love Hurts is terribly written. This is the film’s original sin, even great direction couldn’t save this film from its shoddy script (brought to you by Luke Passmore and Matthew Murray & Josh Stoddard). The story revolves around Marvin’s dark past rising in time for the hearts and flowers holiday when he received a mysterious Valentine in the mail. A femme fatale from his past is back, and she sets off a chain reaction of chaos that SHOULD be entertaining but is completely humorless and boring. Ariana DeBose, whose post-Oscar career is starting to look like a deliberate act of sabotage, stars as Rose, an embezzler Marvin crushed on and once helped to escape certain death.
Now, Marvin’s crime-lord brother, Knuckles (Daniel Wu), wants Rose and Marvin dead for reasons. Seriously, motivations change scene-to-scene, and the film is shockingly disinterested in these central relationships, never mind that Quan and DeBose don’t have the chemistry to sell a long-lost yearning relationship. Instead of investing in these core character conflicts, Love Hurts has Quan delivering obvious voice over and every character declaring their intentions like they’re reading prompt cards given to them by a therapist. Everything is obvious and surface, there is no subtext let alone context, this film is about as well constructed as one of the bland model homes Marvin shows off.
It’s just so frustrating to watch so much talent go to waste. Besides Quan and DeBose, Love Hurts also stars Mustafa Shakir—in the film’s only genuinely interesting role, a poetic assassin called The Raven—Lio Tipton, Sean Astin, Rhys Darby, and Marshawn Lynch, who is genuinely funny but given nothing to do but shout. The writing is so bad, no one has anything to play except one, terribly obvious note. Even Quan can’t salvage anything out of Marvin’s singular desire to preserve his dull second life. After establishing Marvin’s chief desire, he simply has nowhere else to go and is left to hammer home the same point over and over until the whole thing starts to feel beneath him.
It seems like the filmmakers thought they wouldn’t need to do anything except put Ke Huy Quan in a series of cute sweaters and fight scenes, but movies need stories, and Love Hurts doesn’t have much of a story. There is the shadow of something better haunting the edges of the film which suggests its truncated runtime might be the result of editing suite meddling. The film that exists, though, wants to be an action-comedy that mines Valentine’s Day for humor and subversiveness from combining hearts and hitmen, but it has no heart of its own to fuel the narrative beyond the setup. It’s a crying shame because Ke Huy Quan is a charming leading man, but he deserves more than to be stuck in such rote, half-assed storytelling. He’s working far harder than this film deserves. Love Hurts is made to make you blue.
Love Hurts is now playing exclusively in theaters.
