The “regular guy is really a secret killer” genre wasn’t invented by the John Wick movies, but it’s felt like there’s been a lot more of them since that canine-inspired murder spree. Violent Night, Sisu, and Nobody have all proved that audiences will always root for the implausible badass with right on their side, and that’s true again in Love Hurts. However, it also proves that you need more than just a putz of a good guy to add up to a good movie.
Luckily, its good guy is audience favorite Ke Huy Quan as Marvin, the hardworking realtor with a heart of gold who wants to see you in a new home. However, he’s inevitably not who he seems to be, and when henchmen of his gangster brother, Knuckle (Wu), arrive on Valentine’s Day of all days, well, off come the Clark Kent glasses and out come the fists.
In a way, Love Hurts manages two of its big objectives. First of all, it’s a dumb, breezy, occasionally witty, regularly entertaining action-comedy. More importantly, it lets Quan show his range much as he did in <a href=” Everything Everywhere All at Once. In that rightfully Oscar-winning film (and performance), he showed an audience that knew him as a child actor – as Short Round in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom or Data in The Goonies – that he could play an adult. And not just an adult: He could be nerdy or cool or even sexy. With Dark Marvin, Love Hurts shows a genuinely dangerous side that the nebbish Marvin hides. But where Love Hurts fails is in being as good a film as the premise promises.
It’s so close, not least because Quan is so effortlessly charming. There’s undeniably something of Jackie Chan or Harold Lloyd about the way he combines impossible grace with affable awkwardness, and that’s more than enough to sustain 83 minutes of action-comedy. Not that he’s doing all the lifting by himself, as there’s a hilarious subplot about Marvin’s miserable assistant, Ashley (Lipton), becoming besotted with the warrior-poet known as the Raven (Shakir) who has been dispatched to, well, dispatch Marvin. There’s also plenty of laughs to be had from Eriksen and King as two rent-a-killers who rely on each other for covering fire and relationship advice.
But underlying every charming, oddly romantic moment there’s a lumpen and obvious script by Matthew Murray, Josh Stoddard, and Luke Passmore that feels caught between multiple drafts, both unfinished and untrusting of its ability to tell its own very simple story. The problems are displayed and amplified by the absolute lack of heat between Quan and West Side Story star Ariana DeBose as Rose, the criminal accountant who drags him back into his old life. Eusebio resorts to explaining their relationship through out-of-nowhere inner monologue exposition, telling rather than doing any of the hard work to show their supposed attraction.
Worst of all, Love Hurts is so astoundingly poorly pitched, tonally. Eusebio is clearly trying to emulate the golden era of Hong Kong action comedies, and the film will jauntily bounce along until there’s a sudden burst of extreme, bloody violence that just brings everything to a ghastly halt. It’s like watching Armour of God or Wheels on Meals and then suddenly someone drops in a kill from the notoriously hyper-violent Riki-Oh: The Story of Ricky. There’s even a direct and completely misguided visual reference to 2003’s horror remake, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Removing all the gore would actually improve the film, making this the rare instance in which a PG-13 cut would be better than the R-rated version we’re stuck with. It’s all intended to remind us that Marvin has the capacity within him to be a very, very bad man, which makes it all the more infuriating that this is when Eusebio decides to show rather than tell. So maybe the biggest failure of Love Hurts is that it doesn’t really trust Quan to be the leading man he clearly can be.
This article appears in February 7 • 2025.
