Ke Huy Quan, lead actor of “Love Hurts,” won an Academy Award for his performance in “Everything Everywhere All at Once” two years ago. Now, in his first live-action film role since, he gets to hide behind a couch while former NFL running back Marshawn Lynch gets into a gunfight with HGTV Property Brother Drew Scott.
That basically sums up the randomness of “Love Hurts,” the directorial debut of Marvel and “John Wick” series stuntman Jonathan Eusebio, which is a completely arbitrary and structureless film. It follows former assassin turned realtor Marvin Gable, played by Quan, who is reeled back into the world of crime after his former partner-in-crime resurfaces. With his crime-boss brother Alvin in hot pursuit, Marvin must confront his past.
Possibly the most disappointing part of the movie is how much potential it had. In addition to Quan, “Love Hurts” features another Oscar winner in Ariana DeBose, as well as a talented filmmaking team. Joining Eusebio is David Leitch, director of numerous popular action films such as “Bullet Train” and “Deadpool 2,” who serves as a producer.
The action is choreographed and shot well, although the gun-shooting and face-punching does become painfully redundant towards the end of the film. Unfortunately, “Love Hurts” very much feels like it was directed by a stuntman, as aside from the action, nothing else works.
An overwhelmingly terrible aspect of the film is the inexperience of the writing team. Not only does having multiple writers on such a simple story make the movie feel especially clunky, but the crew of Luke Passmore, Josh Stoddard and Matthew Murray have a combined two feature-film writing credits excluding “Love Hurts.”
That inexperience is felt in every moment, as the screenplay is so poorly written that somehow Lynch and Scott feel like they are acting on the same level as Quan and DeBose. The dialogue is certainly to blame, as not only is it poorly written on the page, but on screen, it drops Oscar winners to the same peg as Super Bowl winners.
Perhaps the worst part of the film is the final 20 minutes, when the action becomes extremely repetitive and thus loses any impact or meaning. Also, not only does the main conflict wrap up in a hilariously underwhelming way, but the ending is also framed as a reveal of a huge mystery. The only problem is that there was no mystery, nor did the “big reveal” make any of the rest of the film clearer.
One of the biggest parts of the marketing of “Love Hurts” is that it is supposed to be a Valentine’s Day movie. That could not be further from the case. Aside from a few heart decorations in the background and an uncomfortably forced romance between the two main characters — Quan is two decades older than DeBose — there is simply no reason to set the film at Valentine’s aside from capitalizing on a holiday box office.
In fact, not setting the film around Valentine’s Day would almost certainly have made it better, as it would simply knock one of the film’s monumental failures off the list, thus turning it into just a bad action movie instead of a bad Valentine’s and action movie.
Overall, “Love Hurts” is a major disappointment, especially given the talent working both on screen and behind the scenes. It fails in almost every sense of the word, leaving viewers not feeling any sort of love on Valentine’s Day, but rather confusion and dissatisfaction.
