Does Nazareth Get a Cut for Naming Rights?

Film: Love Hurts
Format: Streaming video from Peacock on Fire!

Some people are natural action stars and some people aren’t, and it’s not always clear who works and who doesn’t. When Bruce Willis did Die Hard, it was seen as a huge misfire until people actually saw the movie. Who would have believed Bob Odenkirk as a movie badass before Nobody came out? Love Hurts attempts to do the same thing for the recently career-resurrected Ke Huy Quan, and sadly, the whole thing feels like an error. The action sequences are fun, but the movie itself is a huge miss.

It's a shame, too, because I really like Ke Huy Quan. He’s easy to like, and that’s one of the problems with Love Hurts. We’re presented with real estate agent Marvin Gable (Quan), who is evidently a very good real estate agent and who has signs up all over town. Someone is defacing those signs, though, giving him mustaches and sideburns, which seems like a harmless prank and the sort of thing that typically happens to real estate agents.

What we’re going to find out soon enough, though, is that Marvin Gable is someone who once led a much different life. In his past, he was a killer working for his brother Alvin (Daniel Wu), who goes by the nickname of Knuckles. In the past, Marvin was told to kill a woman named Rose (Ariana DeBose) for stealing Alvin’s money, but Marvin, out of love for her, cut her loose and told her to disappear. But now she is back and making herself known, which creates a problem for Marvin’s real estate business and the people he works for and with.

This really is the basic plot of Love Hurts. It’s comedy John Wick as an assassin who has hung up his spurs is dragged back into the business against his will and suddenly has to fight for himself, rediscover the woman he let live, and avoid a series of bad guys who are trying to hunt him down so that they can track down Rose. We’re going to get a lot of shooting, a lot of Kung Fu cinema-style action, some attempts at comedy, and a lot of stunt casting that doesn’t really work that well.

So let’s talk about what doesn’t work. The first thing is that making Ke Huy Quan a heartless killer, even in his past, is a tough sell. Quan worked in Everything Everywhere All at Once because it was fun to see him as wildly competent. It’s very different to see him heartless and cruel, and it doesn’t work for the guy we see at the start of the film.

While some of the casting is fun—Sean Astin as Marvin’s real estate mentor is a decent—but he’s honestly the only other casting that works at all. When I say that the film is filled with stunt casting, I mean it. Marvin’s real estate rival is Jeff Zaks, played by reality real estate mogul Drew Scott (and what happens to him is genuinely one of the only funny things in the film). One of the assassins that attempts to kill Marvin is played by Marshawn Lynch, who naturally yells “Beast mode!” during one of his attacks. Honestly, Lynch is fun, but an actor he ain’t.

There’s also a chemistry issue throughout the film. There’s no real chemistry between Ke Huy Quan and Ariana DeBose, and since he’s supposed to be in love with her as the driving incident of the film, this is actually a significant issue. There’s another romance as well, between Marvin’s depressed assistant Ashley (Lio Tipton) and Raven (Mustafa Shakir), a poetry-writing assassin who is the first to find Marvin at his real estate office. Ashley goes all wibbly over Raven after reading a couple of his poems, no matter that he’s armed with more knives than an army of sushi chefs and spends much of the film attempting to murder her boss.

Love Hurts has some fun ideas, even if they are ideas you’ve certainly seen before in a lot of movies, but it doesn’t know how to close the deal on any of them. This is a series of action sequences loosely hung together with the semblance of a plot that only half works in its best points. The film runs a sparse 83 minutes including credits, and I struggled to maintain my attention on it for the full time. In fact, I had to go back and watch the last few minutes again to see the conclusion, which felt very tacked-on. This needed 15-20 more minutes. I appreciate the attempt at making a short and tight action film, but 100 minutes would have been fine and would have helped with the plot.

I get the attempt on this, but Love Hurts is a solid miss. Ke Huy Quan isn’t Jackie Chan, no matter how many times you shove him into a set piece fighting sequence.

Why to watch Love Hurts: There are a couple of fun moments.
Why not to watch: Everything you have seen here has been done better. A lot better.