A pitiful action-comedy that stubbornly fails to entertain, Love Hurts is a Valentine’s Day–themed disaster getting drubbed at the box office.
Poor Ke Huy Quan, Best Supporting Actor Oscar winner for Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022), claims he turned down the lead role in Love Hurts twice before Steven Spielberg advised him, “Ke, you should do this. It’s great.”
So this is all Steven Spielberg’s fault.
The script by Matthew Murray, Josh Stoddard, and Luke Passmore, and the direction by newcomer and ex-stunt coordinator Jonathan Eusebio, (John Wick, Black Panther) are so weak that the resulting film probably wouldn’t have worked for anybody. It may be time to stop bankrolling stuntmen-turned-directors, a strategy based almost entirely on the wild success of the John Wick franchise. David Leitch, who codirected John Wick, is a producer on Love Hurts.
Unlike the Wick franchise, which became famous for inventive, thrilling, and often hilarious action sequences, Love Hurts’ fight scenes look heavily coordinated and rehearsed. The film’s leaden shooting and editing style are a big part of the problem. I’ve rarely seen a film with such obvious pacing problems — it just limps along. If you’ve seen the preview for Love Hurts, you recognize at once that the marketing team’s editor had a much better sense of how to amp up this material, making the one-liners seem funny and the action scenes pop.
Another big problem is that Quan is plainly too old for the role of Marvin Gable, an amiable, fussy, and highly successful Milwaukee realtor who turns out be an ex-hit man in hiding.
Quan looks every day of his fifty-three years, especially when paired with thirty-four-year-old Ariana DeBose (West Side Story) as his love interest. She’s playing Rose, a tough, savvy former employee of Marvin’s brother, Knuckles (Daniel Wu), a vengeful crime lord who’s after both Marvin and her for what he sees as their rank…
Auteur: Eileen Jones
