To an action movie connoisseur, the name 87North is like the Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval. These guys know and love practical action — fights, chases, shootouts — and they do it, in films like John Wick, Atomic Blonde, and Nobody, better than just about anyone in modern Hollywood. If they’re involved, you know a film is gonna deliver the goods, at least on a technical level.
Unfortunately, movies are more than their technical levels, or even their bravura action. Love Hurts’ fight scenes are as expertly executed as you’d expect from the 87North crew. It’s everything else that’s below par. The story is a jumbled, hurried mess and the award-winning cast can’t settle on a cohesive tone. And to be honest, as crisp as the action sequences are, with so little variety and without anything else of note onscreen to latch on to, they start to feel a little repetitive.
The film should be a showcase for Ke Huy Quan, the former child star of The Goonies and Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom who had a welcome career revival (and won an Oscar) for his role in 2022’s Everything Everywhere All At Once. Here he plays Marvin Gable, a mild-mannered real estate agent with a dark secret: He used to work as a vicious enforcer for his gangster brother Knuckles (Daniel Wu) until he was granted his retirement from “The Life” after agreeing to kill a woman named Rose (Ariana DeBose).
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Except Marvin didn’t kill Rose. He spared her life and hid the evidence. Everything was fine until Rose begins sending taunting Valentine’s Day cards to Knuckles and his men. (The only explanation she offers for this baffling choice is to repeatedly announce to Marvin that “hiding isn’t living.”) Rose’s return sets off a flurry of violence, with Knuckles’ goons trying to find her through Marvin — while Marvin, who secretly loves Rose, tries desperately to protect her and his new life as a humble realtor.
The notion of a retired hitman forced to return to his aggressive ways is a familiar one from action movies in general, and 87North productions in particular. That’s the premise of the John Wick saga, where it served as the foundation for an operatic revenge tale, and also of Nobody, a dark comedy about the incongruity of seeing scrawny Bob Odenkirk as a bone-breaking badass. Love Hurts leans into that same incongruity, with the diminutive Quan wiping the floor with enormous adversaries like Mustafa Shakir and former NFL pro Marshawn Lynch.
But there’s no shock to Quan’s martial arts skills, at least not for anyone who saw him pull off a similar trick in Everything Everywhere All at Once. Still, Quan is way more convincing in the fight scenes than when he’s asked to play Lothario; he has no chemistry with DeBose, whose over-the-top mannerisms are a total mismatch for Quan’s grounded, sheepish performance.
It doesn’t help that Love Hurts is barely 80 minutes long, and everything around the action has been trimmed to the absolute minimum, meaning the script has zero time to offer a single reason why these two people with wildly different temperaments, ambitions, and ages (DeBose is almost 20 years younger than Quan) would ever fall for each other. Director Jonathan Eusebio surrounds the already threadbare A plot with a few loose threads about romance — one hitman sends apologetic texts to an unseen spouse, another falls for a witness to his brutal acts — but the Valentine’s Day setting add nothing of substance to the film except a reason to release it in theaters in the middle of February.
In a world where many big-budget filmmakers are content to let visual effects artists sort out their action scenes for them, it is nice to see a film filled with old school stunts and intricate fight choreography. And Quan remains an extremely likable actor, as well as an impressive martial artist. (Even before Everything Everywhere All at Once, he had worked on several Hollywood productions as a fight choreographer.) It’s great to see him back on the screen, but he’s let down by his material here. When he’s not kicking butt, Love Hurts is downright painful.
Additional Thoughts
-Marshawn Lynch’s performances in this and the recent Bottoms suggest he is a natural comic screen presence. Also, he’s credited in this film as “Marshawn ‘Beast Mode’ Lynch,” and I deeply respect that decision.
RATING: 4/10
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