Jonathan Eusebio’s “Love Hurts” is a disappointing next step in Ke Huy Quan’s action career. His Oscar-winning performance in “Everything Everywhere All at Once” – which also won the Oscar for Best Picture in 2022 – showed incredible range for the actor. He gave a heartbreaking, funny, loveable and action-packed performance as multiple versions of his character across the multiverse. His Oscar win was well deserved, to say the least, and anyone who has seen the film would surely agree. Ariana DeBose, Quan’s “Love Hurts” co-star, is also fresh off the Oscar scene, having won the Oscar for Best Actress in a Supporting Role for “West Side Story” in 2022.
With two recent Oscar winners in top billing, it is unfortunate that their talent was not enough to save the film from poor ratings. It has a depressing 18% critic score on Rotten Tomatoes, a 2.2/5 on Letterboxd and a 5.4/10 on IMDb. Even in its Rotten Tomatoes audience score, it barely breaks the halfway mark in popularity with 61%. While it is not bottom of the barrel for an unserious action-comedy, it is intermediate at best.
The movie follows Marvin Gable (Quan), a successful and positive real estate agent, as he is swept back into his old life of violence as a hitman for his brother Knuckles (Daniel Wu). The catalyst for his return is that a woman from his past, Rose (DeBose), comes back from a faked death and causes trouble in the world of crime they came from. With Rose and several of his brother’s henchmen on his tail, Marvin tries to protect his perfect life while the pull of his unspoken love for Rose makes the decision between his new and old lives harder to make.
While the story itself is not necessarily uninteresting, the film seems to be written for an audience that is barely paying attention. It has voice-over narration scattered throughout, but it doesn’t follow a traceable pattern, making it jarring almost every time it appears after the opening lines. It often serves as an explanation for Marvin or Rose’s feelings about the events of the film, but this is unnecessary as that should have been readable by their expert acting – Rose’s writing is particularly bad, and it makes her impulsive and explosive actions come across as overly “quirky” and cringe-worthy.
The B-plot shows Marvin’s depressed personal assistant, Ash (Lio Tipton), find a new lust for life in an unlikely romance with Knuckle’s hitman, the Raven (Mustafa Shakir). Their romance buds from a shared love of poetry, but it comes off as fanfiction-esque and falls flat even though it fits the unrealistic nature of the rest of the writing. It seems like he is meant to be written as a caricature of the tough-exterior/soft-interior trope, and while that may work for some, to me he came across as two-dimensional.
The supporting cast is also graced by a handful of bumbling fools posing as henchmen, and, while they provide a little comic relief, it is more annoying than fun to watch them fumble around, missing their target every time and chasing their own tails.
One redeeming quality of the narrative is that its message, stated several times, resonates with the story and is altogether a good message: “Hiding isn’t living.” Rose asserts that the life Marvin built after leaving the crime life is purely a coverup for who he truly is. Marvin eventually overcomes his brother’s control and chooses his love for Rose over his cookie-cutter life; thus, he chooses living over hiding. This is a heartfelt message that surely resonated with a diverse audience, but it can’t outweigh the negatives of the film.
