'Love Hurts': This Action Comedy Will Make You Wince

Ke Huy Quan and Ariana DeBose deserve better

When Goonies actor Ke Huy Quan won the Oscar in 2023 for Best Supporting Actor it was such a moment of triumph, the stuff Hollywood dreams are made of. It was even better hearing that Quan was actually getting roles — not always a guarantee — and leading the action/comedy/romance Love Hurts. There’s something so wonderful about seeing Quan’s face on huge billboards up and down Hollywood. It’s just sad that the movie’s not at all worthy of his talents, or the talents of everyone else associated with it.

Quan stars as Marvin Gable, a mild-mannered realtor who has zero personality traits or life beyond that. When a red Valentine’s day card with the words “With Love” on it appears it signals the return of Rose (Ariana DeBose), a woman from his past many presumed was dead. Rose’s return kicks off a change of events that sees Marvin’s old life coming back to haunt him, and trying to kill him.

It’s genuinely unclear what Love Hurts’s greatest failing is. Director Jonathan Eusebio makes his directorial debut after years of being a fight coordinator and assistant director. The fights themselves are fun to watch, if the style 87North productions employ is starting to get a tad repetition. If you’ve watched the fights in Bullet Train or The Fall Guy you know what I’m talking about. But because of how choppily edited the entire affair is — clocked in at not even 90 minutes — it’s not really clear where Eusebio himself comes through in the production.

The script, credited to Matthew Murray, Josh Stoddard and Luke Passmore has thin threads of an interesting story. We’ve see the tale of an assassin who goes good and tries to start a new life and watching Marvin happily try to be a realtor doesn’t exactly yield a ton of laughs — the humor mostly comes from fight scenes involving items from a staged house and a black-belt wearing Drew Scott as a rival realtor. What could have been cool was watching Quan as an assassin so deadly his own brother, Knuckles (Daniel Wu) calls him a “beautiful monster.”

And it’s a shame because every member of the cast clearly is game for a wild ride. What made Quan work so wonderfully in Everything Everywhere All at Once was his ability to be strong, kind, and romantic and the script never delves into moments long enough for any of that to shine through. Marvin is introduced to us as a chronically smiling man who touts how much he loves his life, but the only scenes of that life include him living in his office, making cookies for those in his office, and selling houses. Does he have friends outside of work? Hobbies? Who knows.

He claims he loves Rose so much, enough to refuse his brother’s command to kill her, but there’s no hints of this love short of flashbacks of her dragging her to an open hole. Not to mention the 21-year-age gap between Quan and DeBose leaves the entire affair entirely chaste and off-putting. As my friend Drew Taylor said, “They had the romantic chemistry of two loaves of bread that happen to be in the same kitchen.”

The rest of the cast are one-note concepts as opposed to fleshed out characters, from an assassin bemoaning his partner kicking him out to another with hidden depths as a poet. These oddball traits only serve to smother an already convoluted story about missing money and a double cross told to us in rapid-fire exposition because, remember, there’s not even 90 minutes of runtime. Mustafa Shakir is an unsung MVP as the poet-spouting Raven, bringing a commanding presence and gravitas to the role. He brings some much needed dynamism to the movie, even if the chronic cut-ins to his instant romance with Marvin’s quasi-suicidal assistant Ashley (Lio Tipton) gets grating fast.

Ariana DeBose rocks a mid-Atlantic accent (?) and is definitely going for fun femme fatale/manic pixie dream girl as Rose. She’s another character that it would have been great to see in the past more, or just have her as the central character. She’s quippy, she’s slick, give her a con movie asap!

Daniel Wu is the most wasted member of the cast, yet seems to be having the most fun, as the evil Knuckles. He and Quan only have one scene together — a bizarre turn considering the history they speak of — but Wu is so chilling that every time he’s on screen you wish, again, that this was his movie. His chugging of boba like it’s literal gasoline he needs to run, and his ability to use a boba straw as a deadly weapon, is the one highlight of Love Hurts. When he kills someone the audience might actually have affection for — or at least is told is a good person — Wu brings all the baddie energy you need.

There are the most fleeting of images of a mustache-wearing Quan from his past and the audience will ache for a straightforward gangster narrative with Quan and Wu as two brothers at odds in the criminal world. There’s a lot of aching though while watching Love Hurts, and it’s not from the fight scenes. It’s unclear whether the film’s hour and 23 minutes was all that was salvageable or focus grouped to death but there are clear indicators that “we’ll fix it in post” happened. At least 75% of the movie is either narration by Quan or DeBose, standing in for feelings someone believed the audience wouldn’t get otherwise, or ADR. There are several moments where you can see characters clearly not talking only for lines to come out. There are also two scenes that are so clearly green screen. Were they reshoots or did the VFX team run out of time to blend them?

Love Hurts wears its bleeding heart on its sleeve to deliver the sole message that: even assassins have shitty love lives. The cast is certainly interesting and, in a different movie, could have made something of this. As it stands Love Hurts limps its way to the finish line. I do want Quan to make more movies, just better ones.

Grade: D

Love Hurts is in theaters tomorrow.