'Love Hurts' is Painfully Dull
After Everything Everywhere All at Once, Key Huy Quan has another film where he kicks butt and takes names. Love Hurts, unlike the aforementioned Oscar-winning feature, lacks the thrills that film had since this film has such a forgettable story coupled with subpar action. It joins a long line of features where the punchline is a protagonist who seems like the last person who can handle their own in a fight and turns out to be an ass-kicker themselves. It's a funny premise that runs low on steam really fast when the plot of the movie is clearly slapped together as the filmmakers were shooting the film.
The story starts with Marvin Gable (Key Huy Quan) riding his bike to work. On his way, he notices many of his real estate billboards being vandalized. Marvin's face is plastered with mustaches, and, yes, even a Hitler stache is drawn onto one of his ads. The gag would be funny if it hadn't been done 1000 times before in other movies. Luckily, it doesn't take long for the movie to get moving, as within ten minutes, Marvin is assaulted at work. The attacker is a man called Raven (Mustafa Shakir). The action scene between the two is okay, but it doesn't pack the creative punch other fights in movies have. It's more of a familiar box of tricks where everyday objects such as chairs or straws are used as weapons.
It turns out that Marvin is being attacked because one of his fellow hitmen stole money from his brother Alvin 'Knuckles' Gable (Daniel Wu), the head of whatever organization they are in. "If you steal from Knuckles, you die" is the modus operandi everyone follows by. Why they stole the money is left up in the air, as a lot of the movie's plot is shrouded in a veil of unnecessary mystery. Understandably, the movie doesn't need to detail the nitty gritty specifics of who's who or why is why. But it would be nice to understand the context behind everything. During some sort of operation, 4 million bucks were stolen, but two million were taken from Knuckles by one of his team members. After successfully fleeing from Knuckles with nowhere to track her, Rose Carlisle (Ariana DeBose) returns to Marvin on a mission to finish Knuckles off. She's tired of hiding, so she decides to get her life back by killing the man who wants to kill her, which throws a wrench into Marvin's life.
Marvin left his criminal organization years ago to become a real estate salesman. He is content with his new life as a salesman. Marvin loves selling houses and owning a house of his own. To him, there's a great deal of freedom in his work he didn't get from his old life. Unfortunately, some people don't want to be changed. As Marvin says in the movie, "You can't change a person who doesn't want to be changed." With Rose reeling back the past Marvin has run away from, he has to fight his way back to freedom, which means he must confront his brother.
Love Hurts is the same movie we've seen a million times before. It's about as overused as the film's title is. It lacks the understanding of what makes a good action movie. It's not like John Wick where the action wows us, allowing us to forget the disposable plot. Love Hurts is only 80 minutes long, and even within those 80 minutes, the picture drags itself along the ground like a dog scooting its butt on the ground. It's a film that borrows conventions from other action movies without any heart to support itself. It's an imperfect Valentine's Day-themed flick that does little to elevate its material. For lack of a better term, the movie is cliche to the point of exhaustion. Did the filmmakers have this film's plot planned out at all? Or was it done all on the spot? Considering how awkwardly the movie goes from plot A to plot B, it's easy to see how there were too many cooks in the kitchen to produce something tastefully attractive.
With little to no plot and a collection of subpar action scenes, Love Hurts is a painfully bland experience in the theater that wouldn't even appeal to the lowest common denominator. Even the Valentine's Day aspect of the movie feels forced. There's one character who works at Marvin's real estate firm who ends up having a romantic fling with Raven because she likes his poems. Never mind that he trashed Marvin's office in an attempt to kill him. Raven's poems about death are beautiful enough to win Ashley's (Lio Tipton) heart to him. Huh? Like many logical loopholes the movie takes, Love Hurts lacks whatever sweetness it pretends to have in a disposable film that will be forgotten as fast as a piece of heart candy.
