A warning to front-runners Zoë Saldaña and Kieran Culkin — if Love Hurts is any indication, winning a Best Supporting Oscar turns out to be a terrible career move. Among its many sins, this by-the-numbers action comedy thoroughly wastes the talents of recent honorees Ke Huy Quan and Ariana DeBose.
The posters for the film declares “From the producers of Nobody and Violent Night,” and Love Hurts seems like a desperate attempt to copycat the success of those two movies, combining the “nebbish who’s secretly a killing machine” from the former and “bloody saga set incongruously during a holiday that’s all about love and fellowship” from the latter. And for good measure, they borrow “hire a veteran stunt director for his behind-the-camera debut, with a beloved star of the past in the lead” from John Wick, a franchise co-created by Love Hurts producer David Leitch.
These elements all worked successfully in the past, but they fail to coalesce here, resulting in a film that defies you to care if good defeats evil or if boy reconnects with girl.
Marvin (Quan) is a successful real-estate agent in a generic suburb, the kind of guy whose face is on seemingly every bus-stop bench in town. It’s Valentine’s Day, and he’s just won an award as regional salesman of the year, but all is not well; former mobster Rose (DeBose) has reemerged after being left for dead, and she wants revenge against Alvin, aka Knuckles (Daniel Wu, Westworld), the generic suburb’s local crime boss, who also happens to be Marvin’s brother.
Marvin used to be Alvin’s ruthless muscle, but for reasons never entirely specified, Alvin released him to become the nondescript success he is today. But Knuckles’ pursuit of Rose means sending violent henchmen like the poetry-spouting Raven (Mustafa Shakir, Ghosted) and trigger-happy King (Marshawn Lynch, Bottoms) and Otis (André Eriksen, Violent Night) out to capture Marvin, hoping that Rose will follow.
The barely-crafted romance between Marvin and Rose — for all the individual charisma of Quan and DeBose, there’s no sense that these two have ever experienced affection for the other — relies upon the screenplay telling us (via clumsy internal monologues) that they love each other rather than showing it, which is just one element of the bad writing on display here. The script is also fully padded with lazy, pointless repetition, where no one says a line like “Hiding ain’t living” or “You steal from Knuckles, you die” once if they can say it five times. For all the conversation about Marvin’s choice — and why, exactly, is he plying his new trade in the same town where his brother commits his evil deeds? — the film ultimately doesn’t care whether he reverts to being a badass or remains a badass Realtor.
The contrivances of the who-scammed-who mob plot would be forgivable if Love Hurts delivered on the fight front, but more often than not, the melees are predictable and un-thrilling, even with the spectacle of Quan taking on assailants that are twice his height. Director Jonathan Eusebio, who coordinated memorable fights in films like The Fall Guy and Black Panther, never manages to make these moments pop, although he does get in one memorable, Tati-esque visual gag involving Quan scaling a series of fences separating the tiny lawns of a row of ticky-tacky houses.
Those houses, incidentally, are as bland as anything you’d see on the Hallmark Channel, and while that could have been an effective joke — gunfire and hand-to-hand combat unfolding in a model home replete with beige walls and “live, laugh, love” signage on the walls — the generic interiors instead become part of the wet-cement visual scheme perpetrated by cinematographer Bridger Nielson.
Since the trio of screenwriters haven’t given Quan or DeBose much to play, it’s up to the supporting cast to find moments to shine, in the way that Judy Greer or Zoey Deschanel used to steal scenes in otherwise forgettable 2000s rom-coms. Shakir and Lio Tipton (as Marvin’s depressed assistant) have an oddball romantic energy that Love Hurts could use way more of, and Lynch and Eriksen squeeze as much buddy-comedy juice as they can from their one-dimensional characters. Sean Astin pops up mainly to remind the audience that he and Quan once co-starred in The Goonies; Rhys Darby, as a corrupt mob accountant, tries his hardest to mine the material for laughs, which is more than can be said for Cam Gigandet as Alvin’s lieutenant.
Ke Huy Quan’s return to film and TV has been one of the most satisfying comeback stories in recent show-biz history, and the best thing Love Hurts can do for that comeback is to be completely forgotten by St. Patrick’s Day. And that’s what really hurts.
Director: Jonathan Eusebio
Screenwriter: Matthew Murray & Josh Stoddard and Luke Passmore
Cast: Ke Huy Quan, Ariana DeBose, Daniel Wu, Mustafa Shakir, Lio Tiptin, Cam Gigandet, Marshawn “Beastmode” Lynch, Sean Astin
Executive producer: Ben Ormand
Producers: Kelly McCormick, David Leitch, Guy Danella
Cinematographer: Bridger Nielson
Production design: Craig Sandells
Editing: Elísabet Ronaldsdóttir
Music: Dominic Lewis
Sound design: Gregorio Gomez, Patrick Haskell
Production companies: Universal Pictures, 87North
In English
83 minutes
