Ticketworthy! - Love Hurts

A generous review of Love Hurts might call it overly ambitious. It is full of ideas that almost certainly sounded really good in a pitch meeting. Unfortunately, none of them are executed well. The parts that do work are so few and far between that all they do is make you realize just how unenjoyable everything else is.

Though there aren’t many saving graces in the film, Ke Huy Quan does deserve praise for his performance as the likable former-killer, Marvin. He spends the movie doing his best Jackie Chan impression as he smiles and charms his way from action scene to action scene where he demonstrates some real martial arts chops. The fight scenes are without question the highlight of Love Hurts, thanks to him. He brings a frantic, funny energy to each fight and does his best to make them exciting and creative. Quan is having a well-earned career resurgence lately, so it’s a bit of a tragedy that this movie lets him down so badly.

Outside of Quan, though, there’s very little to praise. The flimsy plot revolves around Marvin’s ex-girlfriend, who he was supposed to have killed, returning and upending his new life as a mild-mannered realtor. There’s a mob boss and various assassins that all want a piece of her and, by extension Marvin, as they try to get their hands on money she stole years before. As a story, it could work fine, but the characters are all so uninteresting and the dialogue is so terrible that the whole thing turns into a confusing mess. It’s hard to follow, and even harder to care.

At various points, the movie comes to a screeching halt so that Marvin and Rose, the ex, can have inner monologues about what the actual story is and how they got there. It’s as though the writers or director realized that none of it made any sense and decided to just stop the movie and literally explain things to the audience. That is not a sign of a well-made film. 

The characters themselves are all quirky, particularly the assassins, but none of them are explored enough to really care about them. Every time one of them starts to hint at a backstory, the movie jumps to a fight scene and then moves on. Somebody on the writing team wrote several fun, interesting villains, and I wonder how they feel about how poorly those characters were used.

The movie I kept being reminded of, from the characters to the lighting and color choices, was 2022’s flawed but incredibly fun Bullet Train. It really seems like Love Hurts wanted to be the successor to that film but sadly copied all of the flaws and none of the fun. The script and direction fail so thoroughly that all the humor and delight that make Bullet Train a cult-classic have been sucked right out of Love Hurts. What we’re left with is a muddled, uneven Valentine’s movie with little appeal and even less heart.