Love hurts and so did my head after watching Love Hurts—an unfortunate trainwreck of a film. It’s really unfortunate as there was some potential in this lame attempt at imitating John Wick. It just doesn’t come together in any cohesive way.
Marvin Gables (Ke Huy Quan) was a cold-blooded assassin for his brother “Knuckles” (Daniel Wu) in a past life. Now he happily and successfully sells real estate. Then he receives a letter from Rose (Ariana DeBose), a woman in Knuckles’ organization whom he held unexpressed love for and was ordered by Knuckles to kill. Instead of killing her, he freed her. Now Marvin has to reconcile with his violent past.
Quan is a solid choice to play Marvin. In his new life as the unassuming real estate agent, Marvin goes all in, working day and night. Then, when his past life comes knocking, he’s convincing enough with the physicality demanded of the role. Quan does a great job of establishing Marvin’s double life. DeBose exudes a ton of charisma as Rose. She palpably delights in watching Marvin unravel the mysteries she sets before him as bait to lure him back into his former role as a one man army. However, their “will they/won’t they” chemistry isn’t quite as convincing.
Terrible directing and terrible writing are what doom this film to mediocrity at best. The script written by Matthew Murray, Josh Stoddard, and Luke Passmore is chock full of holes, and completely unnecessary plots are explored entirely too thoroughly (like the budding romance between Marvin’s office assistant, Ashley (Lio Tipton) and hit man Raven (Mustafa Shakir). Not only is it absurd on its face, but it occupies an inordinately large amount of screen time).
First time director Jonathan Eusebio clearly demonstrates how green he is at the job. Generally, I think he was too hamfisted with the emotional content of the limited script he was working from. He tried too hard to make the viewer react in a particular way—especially during action sequences—instead of letting the actors and choreographers negotiate those scenes in a more organic fashion that it all just falls flat at the end of the day.
The film’s biggest mercy is its brevity. It’s a scant 83 minutes long, though those 83 minutes sometimes felt interminably long. Love Hurts is a film where the ingredients just don’t work out in any meaningful way. Not only does it hurt, it sucks.
Directed by Jonathan Eusebio.
Written by Matthew Murray, Josh Stoddard, and Luke Passmore.
Starring Ke Huy Quan, Ariana DeBose, Daniel Wu, Mustafa Shakir, Lio Tipton, etc.
2/10 = AVOID IT AT ALL COSTS (IT SUCKS)
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