‘Love Hurts’ wastes Ke Huy Quan

In Love Hurts, the soft-spoken sweetheart plays Marvin Gable, a real estate agent with a secret past as a hitman for a criminal organization. A few brief flashbacks portray a hardened, mustachioed Marvin wielding handguns with silencers, but he also happens to be a proficient martial artist. The two skills aren’t connected, but who’s counting? As it happens, a woman from Marvin’s past—Rose (fellow Oscar-winner Ariana DeBose), long thought dead by the criminal underworld—has re-emerged, and Marvin’s gangster brother Knuckles (Daniel Wu) believes he knows why, and sends several goons to track him down.

Ignoring the fact that Love Hurts has a few too many characters named for Sonic the Hedgehog mainstays, there’s nothing really fun about the movie, even once the fireworks begin. Scene after scene, an unsuspecting Marvin is attacked by a number of hired guns—from the stone-faced, blade-wielding Raven (Mustafa Shakir) to the bickering hench-duo of Otis (André Eriksen) and King (the NFL’s Marshawn Lynch, credited as Marshawn “Beast Mode” Lynch)—but their fights go quickly awry. Quan’s experience as a stunt coordinator ensures a stellar physical rhythm, with timed reactions akin to a Jackie Chan comedy, but the action seldom has any impact. Every bit of combat has too rehearsed a quality, and every strike hits either too slowly, or feels too sped up (as though it were shot slowly in the first place). When projectiles are thrown, they miss by a country mile. When punches connect, the edit cuts around them ten different ways. The action is a chore.

Ke Huy Quan's experience as a stunt coordinator came in handy during "Love Hurts."

Universal Pictures

You would think, then, that the film gets at least something right—some fundamental element of its story—but think again. The long, expository dialogue serves to make tenuous connections between Gangster A and Lawyer B and Account C, only for characters to repeat all this information ad nauseam to people who already seem to know it. The barrage of information constantly stands in for actual character dynamics; Marvin and Rose are meant to share some kind of personal history, though its nature is entirely unclear, because no two actors ever behave as if they’re in the same physical space. Beyond a point, performing Love Hurts becomes an exercise in reciting the script as-written, because there seems to be very little on the page from which to actually draw.

It's also, quite oddly, a film in which the protagonist and antagonist barely interact (did I mention they’re brothers?). Rather than forging real relationships, Love Hurts is far too content simply aping the texture of a Guy Ritchie gangster comedy, but without putting in the groundwork to make its archetypes make sense. The closest the movie comes to a real spark is between the Raven and one of Marvin’s colleagues Ashley (Lio Tipton), a pessimistic worker drone who chances upon the assassin’s book of poetry. This being her impetus for falling in love makes for a hilarious comedy beat on paper, but it’s played with misguided sincerity, as though the movie fancies itself an in-depth treatise on romance.

From left, Lio Tipton as Ashley, Ke Huy Quan as Marvin Gable and Mustafa Shakir as The Raven.

Universal Pictures

Quan at least gets to flex his dramatic muscles on occasion—the chipper Marvin is desperate to maintain his newfound, mundane normalcy, so he’s upset when the chaos starts—but his emotional trajectory is a flattened curve. There’s nothing more to him than wanting to be recognized as a good realtor, and there’s even less to his dynamic with Rose, who’s similarly one-tracked; she’s out for revenge, but you’d struggle to name any of her defining traits.

Such a high-caliber cast ought to be saddled with a little more than a film that simply forces them through the motions (between this and Kraven the Hunter, DeBose ought to fire her agent). The film does gesture towards its characters finding reasons to live, or to make life seem beautiful, but it’s all so dull and extraneous that ending things seems like an equally viable option. That’s one hell of a sentiment for Valentine’s Day, but when the season’s cinematic offerings are this bleak, it’s easier to sit at home and scarf down some ice cream solo—preferably not tomato-flavored.