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Love Hurts is a Stopped Heart of a Movie

It’s been dispiriting since his 2023 comeback to see Ke Huy Quan, so delighted to be in the spotlight again and charmingly enthusiastic to a fault, seemingly sign on to whatever is offered to him by a Hollywood eager to exploit, rather than seek out better alternative projects like Everything Everywhere All at Once was. He joined the Loki show, he’s done a few comic relief voice roles for animated movies, he’s signed on to a Russo Brothers film for Netflix -and it’s sad to see his talents and distinct personality wasted by these. Love Hurts looked like an antidote, or at least something that would position him differently. There is arguably after all a niche to be filled in mainstream cinema, since the retirement of Jackie Chan, for martial arts action-comedies -and Quan, a seasoned stunt coordinator and funny performer, could fit that bill perfectly.
I hope he gets the chance for a second take of that, because Love Hurts is clearly a mulligan. A movie built around Quan with great potential as a concept, but that is just about a total fumble in practice. A sharp idea translated by a gaggle of unambitious rookie filmmakers. And as if cornering one recent Oscar-winner into this wasn’t bad enough, Ariana DeBose is roped in as his foil and love interest -faring much worse than he does.
The rom-com angle and Valentine’s Day theming was most likely plastered on as a cheap marketing tie-in to an ill-served holiday -the title does this as well. The movie’s plot and primary driving theme does not have anything to do with subjects of romance, and very little effort is made to connect it beyond the simple re-packaging of some plot devices and adding a tangential motivation. For whatever reason, Valentine’s Day just happens to be the chosen gimmick of DeBose’s Rose, whose life was spared some years back by a hitman after she stole money from a powerful gangster. Now, she has come out of hiding, endangering that hitman -Quan’s Marvin Gable- living a free life as a real estate agent. What complicates matters is the very gangster going after them both is Marvin’s brother Alvin (Daniel Wu), known as “Knuckles”. And it happens just at the peak of Marvin’s post-crime career.
Marvin is largely a shallow re-tread of the most popular impression of Waymond Wang from Everything Everywhere All at Once -the adorable ball of high energy sweetness that gives way to a slick and badass martial artist. It’s a type that can certainly work outside of that film (even as it would hamstring Quan severely as an actor), but here it feels like the most hollow variation, as though Quan was instructed to simply play it up with no real motivation or direction. He’s still a compelling screen presence and his real excitement shines through, but it doesn’t move the audience this time around; and while his stunt finesse is impressive, it’s harder to glean it with how the fight scenes are shot and edited -clearly aiming for the energy and intensity of John Wick, but without an ounce of its dedication or craft. There’s an occasional interesting choice, like how the camera for a bit takes on the POV of a plaque that Marvin is desperate to save -symbolic of his success in his new life- but it’s only as a joke and doesn’t actually illuminate the scene in any way. The camera and the choreography are equally frenzied, the clearest bits of the fights are those that slow the pace down, which only has the effect of rendering them weightless; and though the movie makes a point of being quite violent (Marvin is stabbed right through the hand very early on), there’s virtually no impact to it.
The same is true of Marvin's backstory, glimpsed in brief but innocuous flashbacks, and then only so far as his criminal legend is concerned (he had a moustache in those days). The movie is only interested in what he did and why he stopped -and that latter point is quite fuzzy. He ostensibly quit because of his affection for Rose and his refusal to kill her, and yet he also apparently had been wanting out for as long as he was in -crushed under the weight of his brother's power and malevolence -the complexity and dysfunction of that relationship is not developed in the least; there is no reason at all for Marvin and Knuckles to be brothers. The script leans closer to the former motivation but Quan plays the latter as more earnest -perhaps intuiting the complete lack of romantic chemistry between him and DeBose. 
In his defence, the script provides very few opportunities for this romance to build out -which is a shame, because it has potential to be very cute. But also, DeBose does not make for a great scene partner or foil. Like Quan, her post-Oscar win career has been disappointing to say the least, but Love Hurts is probably her single strongest case of miscasting yet. Rose is a badly constructed character to begin with, her Valentine's gimmick an embarrassment and her confident daredevil attitude a cliché. Yet DeBose hardly improves upon these, her sly, flirtatious act so disingenuous it only reveals how little there is to her character beyond that. Her noble intentions to expose Knuckles's outfit don't mesh at all with her innate immaturity -she goes around town comically defacing Marvin's real estate signs. The character is a mess, though I can see where she might be made compelling, but DeBose, wonderfully talented though she is, is ill-suited to generating that.
Director Jonathan Eusebio is also way out of his depth. It would appear as though somewhere in post-production, he felt the movie was lacking in clarity -it's the only explanation I can imagine for why a series of voiceover narrations are suddenly dropped in, alternating between Marvin and Rose's inner monologues. And it would be awkward enough if the exposition wasn't so pointless; if it didn't just state what was directly obvious via context clues. This movie doesn't have a lot of faith in its audience's intelligence, and perhaps the competence of its writers is an indication as to why. More than anything, it seems driven by dumb impulse; like a running gag involving the breakdown in the marriage of one of Knuckles's goons Otis (André Erisken), partnered with Marshawn Lynch giving him relationship advice between violent confrontations. Or there is the casting of Sean Astin as Marvin's cowboy boss purely for the novelty of a Goonies reunion. There is a whole romantic subplot between Marvin's beleaguered assistant Ashley (Lio Tipton), and his first would-be assassin Raven (Mustafa Shakir) -the one genuinely interesting combatant in the whole movie, who fights with a flurry of elaborate blades- but it is a stagnant relationship that the writers have palpably little interest in; a beat designed to fatten out the movie a little and haphazardly tie into that vacant love theme.
And nowhere is that romantic emptiness felt more than in the ending, where the movie tries to convince you that was what it was all about, when it tangibly was not the case. Love Hurts has energy, perhaps a sole virtue, but it is completely uncoordinated and eclectic in a way that suggests an enthusiasm for but dearth in practical understanding of action cinema. Any human story around this is impossible to take with even a grain of investment and the Valentine's angle is one of the cheapest marketing ploys I've seen in a good while. Quan deserves better, DeBose deserves new management, and nobody deserves to have to think about this movie again.

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