Love Hurts Is A Painful Waste of A-List Talent

On paper, Love Hurts sounds terrific: A martial arts action movie directed by a former stunt coordinator, starring a beloved actor in the midst of a triumphant career renaissance. It’s a winning formula! It’s in fact the formula created by John Wick, the movie directed by Keanu Reeves’ former stunt double and which singlehandedly revived Reeves’ waning career. And it’s a formula that many, many John Wick knockoffs have tried to recreate, mostly to failed effect. Sadly, Love Hurts is just another one of those lackluster, borderline embarrassing, failed John Wick knockoffs.

Real estate agent Marvin Gable (Ke Huy Quan) might just be the closest a human being can be to a walking ray of sunshine. He’s unfailingly cheery, even in the wake of his assistant Ashley’s (Lio Tipton) latest depressed phone call, and even as he discovers every one of his billboards around town has had graffiti drawn all over his face. But his face finally drops when he receives a strange anonymous Valentine’s Day card declaring, “I’m back,” before he steps into his office and receives a knockout punch to the face. He wakes up with a knife in his hand and a former cohort (Mustafa Shakir) in his face, demanding he tell him where Rose (Ariana Debose) is. It turns out, as we learn in frighteningly rapid exposition, that Marvin is a former hitman who helped Rose fake her demise after she became the target of his gangster brother, Knuckles (Daniel Wu). As Marvin desperately tries to keep a grip on the simple new life he’s made for himself, he’s besieged by more assassins sent by Knuckles, along with Rose herself, who is determined to bring Marvin back to his old, hardened self.

It seems like there’s a mandatory checklist for every 87North film since the David Leitch-Kelly McCormick production company started churning out action thrillers in the wake of their John Wick success. A charismatic, but frequently underestimated, hero with a dark past: check. Assassins that descend on the hero in balletic flights of fury: check. Bright neon lighting: check. Bone-crunching action and absurdly gory murders: check and check. We’ve been hard on the MCU for homogenizing our cinematic landscape, but maybe we should start looking to the John Wick knockoff factory too — because it’s clear with Love Hurts that they’ve perfected a formula, and that formula is not working.

Let’s get one thing straight, though: the one thing that Love Hurts didn’t get wrong is Ke Huy Quan. Quan, in his first solo feature film vehicle since he won an Oscar for his career-making role in Everything Everywhere All At Once, is absolutely, irrepressibly, great in Love Hurts. Quan’s own natural cheerfulness shines through in a character whose motives are paper-thin at best, and whose transformation between hardened assassin and happy-go-lucky realtor is mostly kind of hand-waved with a mustache and some slick martial arts moves. Everything Everywhere, which was originally conceived for Jackie Chan, made some nods to Quan’s own likeness to the martial arts icon, but Love Hurts feels it actually pays tribute to it — not just in playing up their physical similarities, but in how it allows Quan to juggle both his slapstick skills with his natural charisma and genuine action skills. Quan is a joy to watch, and one wishes that he didn’t have to be weighed down by sharing screentime with actors who didn’t match his verve for life — and his clear joy at getting a comeback at this stage in his career. But alas, one great lead can’t save a movie that is bafflingly bad at almost every turn.

On the polar opposite end of the spectrum from Quan is Ariana Debose, who gives a performance as far from being that of an Oscar winner as one can get. She’s alarmingly bad in this movie, vamping up her performance as the story’s femme fatale so far that she comes off as a cartoon villain. Which is a big problem when the crux of the movie’s emotional arc relies on Quan and Debose showing a lick of chemistry with each other. Marvin, it turns out, let Rose go because he was in love with her — an affection that she never seems to share despite the film painstakingly spelling it out by having both characters proclaim their love for each other in voice over. But any time the two share a scene, it’s like they’re in two different movies — Quan in his scrappy Jackie Chan-lite action-comedy, Debose in a vaudeville Disney parody.

But at least the action’s good, right? Broadly speaking, yes. First-time director Jonathan Eusebio uses his stunt coordinator cred to craft some whirlwind, hard-hitting fight scenes, many of which take advantage of Quan’s natural slapstick ability and quick martial arts reflexes. The camera is never stationary, and cinematographer Bridger Nielson throws in some unusual shots — albeit, ones that rely a little too heavily on CGI. Eusebio even tests the limits of reality in some fun ways, making impressive use of a guy with sword arms. But as brutal and surprisingly bloody as Love Hurts gets, there’s a weightlessness to it that renders every hard-hitting scene redundant. The characters can slice and dice, and crack as many bones as they can — with the over-the-top sound design working overtime — but it won’t register when every hit feels the same. There’s a strange bloodlessness to the film, despite how much blood it actually spills.

It doesn’t help that Love Hurt’s script, co-written by Matthew Murray, Josh Stoddard, and Luke Passmore, comes from the David Leitch school of self-satisfyingly glib — its characters exist to rattle off cutesy catchphrases, or its henchmen are there to offer amusingly dumb banter. The characters and plot are nothing but tools to create “cool” moments, which Eusebio lingers on like a kid showing off his new bike. It’s the “look how awesome” mode of cinema that John Wick wannabes have launched, the genre of movies that are destined to be remembered in “top 10 best fight scenes” YouTube videos.

In the end, Love Hurts mostly feels like a waste — a waste of its cast’s talents, a waste of promising premise, and a waste of our time. And that is the most painful thing of all.

Love Hurts opens in theaters on January 7.