I've seen fake movies within movies that boast more development than Love Hurts. Jonathan Eusebio's Valentine's Day actioner is a catastrophic miss for David Leitch and Kelly McCormick's 87North Productions, unfit to challenge the likes of Nobody, Bullet Train, or Violent Night. Ke Huy Quan's resurgence takes a nosedive thanks to a three-writer team that might as well have scribbled their screenplay in crayon over a single lunch meeting. The casting choices, overkill narration, and tumble-dry cinematography are all laughably nonsensical, but at least everyone involved got paid.
What? There has to be a positive here somewhere.
Quan stars as squeaky-clean realtor and ex-hitman Marvin Gable. He's started a new life, even winning "Realtor of the Year," but the sins of his past return with a vengeance. A Valentine appears from an old crush and colleague, Rose Carlisle (Ariana DeBose). The problem? She's supposed to be playing dead. Instead, she kicks the hornet's nest and angers Marvin's brother Knuckles (Daniel Wu), the ruthless, boba-drinking boss of Marvin and Rose's former syndicate. It's not long before Knuckles' goons come a-knocking, looking to finish the job Marvin never could.
Let me start with the candy-heart-munching elephant in the room — pushing Quan and DeBose as love interests. It's not an "Oh, he could never" situation, more the lack of sexual tension between parts. Quan reads more as a protective father figure against DeBose's uncontrollable wild child. There's no organic intimacy between players, which studio notes might have caught because few scenes between Marvin and Rose dare make us believe otherwise. Where a genre hybrid like Heart Eyes strikes a symbiotic union between horror and romance, Love Hurts epically fumbles its romantic ingredients between action beats.
Eusebio's mentorship under stuntmen turned filmmakers Chad Stahelski and David Leitch inspires hope for the "Hurt" portion of Love Hurts, but mediocrity is all that's achieved. Choreography is mechanically dull, and performers are somewhat rigid. Marshawn "Beastmode" Lynch is blocky and stiff as one of Knuckles' bruisers, while DeBose's fights are hidden by shaky camerawork like cinematographer Bridger Nielson shot during an earthquake. Quan's background in Taekwondo allows Marvin's movements to flow unmatched, but he never once packs the punch of, say, Bob Odenkirk going to war in Nobody. The joy of perennial sweetheart Ke Huy Quan going all "Vietnamese Action Hero" is muted, stuck within a vacuous environment that won't let anything stand out.
Love Hurts is embarrassingly inept for an 83-minute slugfest that gives up on anything beyond dumb jokes and bloody wounds. Eusebio refuses to allow any action to speak for itself, inserting narration "thoughts" via characters' inner voices that exclaim precisely why, how, and what they're about to do — no matter how infuriatingly obvious. Rose drives off solo, and we hear, "I hope [Marvin] chases me." Marvin gets in a car a few minutes later after some hi-ya foreplay, and we hear, "I have to chase her!" Or there’s the constant repetition of Knuckles’ mantra, “You steal from me, you die.” Like, we didn't know that? It’s the entire plot's premise? Eusebio treats us like our heads are filled with rocks, misunderstanding that our glazed-over expressions are thanks to his film's mind-numbingly uncomplicated story that still fails to make us believe or care about anything put to screen.
There's a thumbnail-sized crumb of fun to be had with Mustafa Shakir's angsty knife-wielding poet, one of Marvin's rivals, who finds love in the form of the successful realtor's depressed assistant (Lio Tipton). Sean Astin pops in as Marvin's boss for a few scenes, but the film treats him unnecessarily dirty for a failed emotional pop. Knuckles' hideout boba tea shop slash martial arts video rental shop is a rad location, so production design gets a shoutout. But that's all there is to compliment; the rest feels like cosplaying genre inadequacies. From Rhys Darby’s horrible fake teeth gumming up dialogue to Drew Scott’s competing real estate salesman and his zero-payoff martial arts joke, it’s one head-scratching decision after the next.
From breakneck tonal switches to insulting ADR'ed exposition dumps, Love Hurts is rough even by feature debut metrics. It's the pill form of "Valentine's Day Action Flick," and it goes down like your throat is dry and you're in a waterless desert. Why is Marshawn yelling his NFL catchphrase? Why isn't “Murder by Boba Straw” funnier? How does his movie fail the meaningful, serious-face setups AND hokey, buttoned-up Marvin warmup scenes where Quan's sunshiney charms fall flaccid? Eusebio has no control over a film that feels directed by studio mandates and shaved into the most chalky-tasting cinematic supplement. It's not a single filmmaker who feels out of their depth; it's the top-to-bottom production.
Rating: 1.5 out of 5