Directed By Jonathan Eusebio

Starring – Ke Huy Quan, Ariana DeBose, Mustafa Shakir

The Plot – A realtor (Quan) is pulled back into the life he left behind after his former partner-in-crime (DeBose) resurfaces with an ominous message. With his crime-lord brother (Daniel Wu) also on his trail, he must confront his past and the history he never fully buried.

Rated R for strong/bloody violence and adult language throughout.

Love Hurts | Official Trailer

POSITIVES

If all that you seek out of “Love Hurts” are the charms and cadence of Ke Huy Quan, or tons of ruthlessly enthralling action, there might be enough distraction in those admirable traits to divert you away from the real issues pertaining to the film, especially since Quan approaches this with the same kind of energy and commitment as that of his Oscar-winning role for “Everything Everywhere All At Once”. On the surface, Quan is a cute and cuddly puppy, full of innocently harmless deliveries and sweet sensitivity, but when the script calls for transformation he delivers in spades, both with swiftly ferocious velocity in the choreography of some pretty physical fight sequences, as well as the grit and resiliency that he supplants to Marvin, in order to make such a small bodied realtor a threat to anyone and everything that he comes across. The material certainly does Quan no favors, especially with the movie’s comedy often bombing so hard, but Quan never loses sight of the tenderness and humanity that he effortlessly elicits towards the character, and in a movie full of disappointing or forgettable performances, he’s a breath of fresh air each time he moves into frame once more, especially in attempting to simultaneously hold onto the dual life that he’s lived as both an assassin and realtor. As for the action, there’s nothing quite as stunning in the stunt work or fight choreography to allow it to compete with stellar action franchises like “John Wick” or “The Raid”, however the technical components within intrusive cinematography and absorbing sound design are capable enough towards fooling the audience into thinking that they’re as brutal and innovative as the movie calls for, particularly with an abundance of R-heavy violence that invades the monotony of every day tedium at around every fifteen minutes during the movie. The camera goes for Matthew Vaughn’s similarities during “The Kingsman” franchise, with tightly illustrated and enthusiastic movements of the lens that seem to mimic the actions and directions of those initiated in the conflict, and though the physicality brings out the telegraphed and gravitational phoniness of smaller characters hurling adversaries that are twice their size, the blanketing sound schemes capturing the extent of such blunt force devastation at least make them detectably immersive for the audience, combining the fun and frenetic traits that so much of this movie entails. Beyond these, my only other praise for the film was its thematic impulse towards dissecting the duality of life, with the two passions of Marvin’s existence merging at a crossroads, and while the script doesn’t dig quite as deep with this framing device as I would’ve liked to explore, it does raise some interesting questions about the choices we make that come to define our course of action, which is why Marvin, now the happiest that he’s ever been as a realtor, finds himself pursued by the past and his devious deeds that were never quite as buried as he thought. It begs the question if one is truly capable of changing or using their past gifts in moderation for a brighter future, making Marvin a compelling protagonist that I wish the movie delved deeper towards his past life, especially considering it makes up so much of the current day narrative and conflict.

NEGATIVES

Effort truly comes in limited doses with “Love Hurts”, as the script is held confined and condensed by a laughable 78-minute run time that not only requires superfluously excessive subplots to pad its feature length, but also dramatically cuts into the establishing beats and backstories of these characters, whom we never quite got a firm grasp on. The biggest sacrifice of these is undeniably in the love story between Marvin and Rose, which feels completely tacked-on both with a lack of development towards romantic interests during the duration of the film, but also a complete lack of chemistry between Quan and DeBose, which often feels clumsily forced and coldly calculating. I can confidently assess that DeBose performance here is at times downright awful, especially her facial registries when attempting to act cool or bad, and while I don’t exactly know if it stems from bad acting or poor direction, I can say that her various deliveries constantly came across like a try-hard that never truly became the role that was demanded of her, with monotonous line reads that made me wince in horror each time she attempted to appraise rebellion to the construct of her character. As for additional subplots, one involving Marvin’s co-worker (Played by Lio Tipton) and an emerging love interest (Played by Mustafa Shakir) receives far too much time and focus to build a dynamic that essentially does nothing for the movie’s integrity, deviating between it and the main narrative throughout, in ways that I never even remotely cared about. Instead of spending time fleshing out Marvin and Rose’s backstory by letting us live in the moment of that timeline, we instead receive ample time with these nothing characters that have the personalities of a burlap sack, and the film’s momentum and pacing are somehow slowed substantially each time they cut back to it, which is quite remarkable for a film that barely clocks in at feature length. Instead of utilizing the path towards feeling like a tool of merit and meaning for the future, the film not only constantly flashes back to various instances brought up in the foreground of the narrative, with abrupt shifts to past visuals that merely mimic what we’re already being told overhead with narration from both Quan and DeBose, but also doubles down on this all tell and no show consistency with some of the most unnecessary and intrusive narration that I have heard since the director’s cut of “Blade Runner”. Narration has always been fine to me in small doses, particularly at the beginning and end of each movie that they adorn, but here they’re constantly overriding the integrity of what’s transpiring in each scene or sequence, with some of the most obvious reflections directly to the audience that constantly made me shout out “No shit”. This makes the film feel like it was heavily altered in post-production, with these longer scenes shoe-horned to cater to an attention-challenged audience, and it makes what we’re given feel like the scattered and sporadic breadcrumbs from the table of a far more expansive and intriguing movie, which is the main blame to why I never found myself even remotely enamored with a single one of these characters or its depicted crime underworld. Adding further to this detriment is a villain that might as well be called ‘Stock villain #8’, as he’s given very little time of development or personality to make him garner a morsel of audience influence, which is made all the more troubling considering he already has a built-in angle of being a brother to Marvin that the script never pursues with depicted commitment. Sure, we hear that they’re brothers constantly throughout the spoon-fed dialogue, but we never get to experience them during their tightly-connective times, and it undersells the magnitude and intrigue of the conflict so impactfully that it never gives the movie an unstoppable force for Quan to act opposite against, made all the more trivial by this established villain having to share time with as many as six other antagonists that weave in and out of frame. Finally, “Love Hurts” is the latest film to be severely affected by an overly revealing trailer, as we not only experience the film’s biggest moments before the movie ever even starts, but also find confliction in how predictable the rest of the movie becomes once you know the primary beats of the narrative. Not that I am expecting twists and turns to a movie this creatively stale and redundant, but even an hour after seeing the movie, I find myself searching for any kind of meaningful moment that wasn’t involved in the marketing trailers, and it makes seeing the movie feel so unnecessary, without a semblance of anything that it does better or as good as any other movie in the genre.

OVERALL
“Love Hurts” lays a beatdown of derivative proportions to the eyes and ears of its action-hungry audience, with flatlined love, surface level explorations, and inconsistent performances that make it such a tedious chore at even 78 brief minutes of screen time. While Ke Huy Quan charms in spite of the movie’s limitations, and the technical prowess of the action scenes help to influence and enhance the movie’s physicality, Eusebio’s feature length directorial debut is a jumbled and condensed mess that highlights inexperience above all else, with a blandly forgettable execution that leaves us heartbroken

My Grade: 4.1 or D-