Love Hurts Movie Review - Nothing but broken hearts
Greetings, guys and gals! Are you planning on doing something special with your beloved valentine? Maybe a candle-lit dinner at an expensive restaurant, a romantic hiking expedition (if you’re the adventurous type), or perhaps, a trip to a traditional drive-in or an indoor movie theater to watch a classic love story reminding how much you and your boyfriend/girlfriend love each other? Well, if you plan on doing the latter, don’t watch “Love Hurts” because it’ll ruin your holiday.
This one honestly hurts. For a guy who immensely enjoys the action genre and admires the fact that Short Round from Temple of Doom is headlining an action-comedy after picking up his Oscar, it’s heartbreaking to see him end up in a movie as disjointed, rushed and schizophrenic as “Love Hurts”.
Valentine’s Day is a very special day for the cheerful, well-prepared realtor, Marvin Gable (Ke Huy Quan). It’s that time of the year where he spreads love and care to couples wanting to buy suburban homes and his fellow employees for their hard work, as well as being awarded by his boss Cliff Cussick (Sean Astin) for his dedication. Things start to change once he receives a letter from an old associate, Rose (Ariana DeBose), and is later confronted by assassins and agents hired to hear of Rose’s whereabouts. Two action scenes later, he reunites with Rose and is informed by her that she needs his help to take down his mob boss brother, Alvin “Knuckles” Gable, for money laundering schemes. So, uh…word of advice for writers. If you’re writing a story about a man who wants to run from his life of being an assassin and start a new life, don’t have your main character take a job as a real estate agent which will get him heavily advertised on billboards, signs and benches. Comprende? And take my word for it, because it’s one of many issues in a film that has way too much going on in such a short runtime of 83 minutes (76 if you were to remove the end credits). From villain side-plots of a henchman trying to rekindle his marriage with his wife, to a clinically depressed realtor assistant finding love with a stoic, knife-wielding assassin obsessed with poetry, to a mob boss’ assistant trying to betray Rose and steal the money for himself, it’s overly busy for its own good.
And for a movie about romance, both Ariana DeBose and Ke Huy Quan have no chemistry whatsoever, on top of the fact that the movie never establishes why we should buy the affection, or former affection, they have for one another and what has happened during a huge time gap of never seeing each other. The plot also makes Rose less of a desirable femme fatale, and more of a manipulative self-titled woman who drags around Marvin getting in the way of his new life just so she can get what she wants. Sounds like the opposite of romantic, if you ask me. It also doesn’t help that our two former flames have to exposit through clunky narration what they’re thinking about each other and what they must do to advance the plot or fulfill a theme as if the audience is too dumb to figure out through the actor’s performance.
The acting is nothing to write home about aside from one—maybe two—performances. Ke Huy Quan does the best he can with shallow material; Supporting actors don’t raise the bar either. Marshawn Lynch is playing Marshawn Lynch, Daniel Wu’s direction as Knuckles is an insult to his talent and Cam Gigandet’s not only awful on screen, but his role is fundamentally pointless aside from barking orders and having orders barked at him by his boss.
But what does this movie bring to the table as far as action goes? Well, from the choreography directed by stunt coordinator turned filmmaker, Jonathan Eusebio, it’s solid in frequent spots…and that’s all it’s got. Barring the adequate combat—to a degree—there is no impact to any of the action scenes. You don’t believe that our main character is getting hurt after every punch, kick, stab or hit by a miscellaneous object. Characters get stabbed in the hand and tossed out of a window, and despite the blood and marks on their body, they still walk away as if the injuries are no big deal. Compared to similar action films, “John Wick” and Ilya Naishuller’s “Nobody” have brutal, fist-pumping action scenes, mainly because—thanks to the believable and brilliant choreography—you feel the pain that characters are feeling during a set-piece which enhances the stakes in stories that are written well. With “Love Hurts,” it’s less “Nobody” and more “Kingsman: The Golden Circle” and “A Good Day to Die Hard”. the zany, cartoonish highly-choreographed action scenes have little weight to them, there’s plot armor that’s applied to protect our protagonists from certain death, and it’s made worse by the fact that none of the characters are worth investing in.
So to all of the wonderful, adorable couples, newly-weds, whomever is reading this review, don’t watch “Love Hurts”. It’s uncomfortably unfunny, it’s overly-compartmentalized, wastes its own acting talent on a shoddy script and the action is as shallow as the characters. It’s kind of shocking how an average “Scream” knock-off like Heart Eyes is more worth watching for Valentine’s Day than action-comedy like this. You broke my heart, “Love Hurts”.
RATING: 1/5
