Love Hurts: Hate the Act, Love the Actor

By Chris Knight

Rating: C-

I had difficulty buying Ke Huy Quan as a mild-mannered realtor who turns into a badass killing machine in Love Hurts. Which is odd, because that’s also essentially what happens in 2022’s Everything Everywhere All at Once, where he goes from meek laundromat co-owner to taking down a phalanx of armed security guards with just a fanny pack.

But there’s a difference between the two movies. Everything Everywhere was a gonzo bit of filmmaking genius that won seven Oscars (including one for Quan) while revitalizing the acting career of the former Goonie. And Love Hurts opens in February.

And sure, they’ll tell you that’s because it’s set on Valentine’s Day. But January-February is also where bad movies go to die. It’s a date movie only in the sense that it opens on February 7, which is indeed a date.

The confusing plot kicks off with Milwaukee home-seller Marvin Gable (Quan) learning that Rose Carlisle (Ariana DeBose) is back from the dead.

At first, I thought she was his ex-wife and that her “death” was a metaphor for her leaving him, but she turns out to be an unrequited crush whose actual death he engineered in his former job as a hitman. Apparently neither the job nor the hit took.

Now she’s being hunted by Marvin’s crime-boss brother (Daniel Wu) and his gaggle of henchmen, including The Raven (Mustafa Shakir), whose soulful poetry causes Marvin’s assistant (Lio Tipton) to fall for him; Otis (André Eriksen), who wants to reconcile with his wife; and the violent but ineffective Merlo (Cam Gigandet).

It’s as if the screenwriters watched Pulp Fiction and thought: “Killers with quirks! I could do that!” Except they couldn’t.

Another thing the movie couldn’t quite pull off was cinematography. The camera shakes, rattles and rolls its way through the fight scenes, which is to say most of the film. Director of photography Bridger Nielson was born in Park City, Utah, but given the number of tilts in his shots I assumed he was Dutch.

Aside from the actors — Quan is joined by his Goonies costar Sean Astin in one scene, which is kinda sweet — there isn’t much depth of experience among the crew. The three writers have done the odd bit of TV and podcast writing, but not much film work. And director Jonathan Eusebio is a stunt performer and stunt coordinator making his first foray into directing, unless you count his second-unit work on a handful of films.

What emerges is a messy tale that throws together some barely there Russian gangsters, bookkeeping fraud (Rhys Darby pops up as a shady accountant) and a rival realtor who happens to have a black belt in karate. There’s also an office Valentine’s Day party, which in this age sounds like a harassment suit waiting to happen.

The good news is that the whole shebang lasts just 83 minutes, stem to stern. The bad news is that you can only coast along on your love of Quan’s natural charm and screen presence for 60- or 65-minutes tops.

After that — well, just look at the title.

Love Hurts. Directed by Jonathan Eusebio. Starring Ke Huy Quan, Ariana DeBose, and Lio Tipton. In theatres February 7.