Love Hurts Review: Ke Huy Quan's Charm And Skills Get Overshadowed By A Generic Action Movie Story

While a lot of modern action movies highlight brutality, Jonathan Eusebio’s Love Hurts is a surprise in that it contains a particular level of charm and sweetness. Leaning heavily into its title and Valentine’s Day setting, it showcases love in a variety of forms, from long-held crushes, to surprise soul bonds, to finding fulfillment in a career. It has a lot of cute ideas and ambitions – but when packed tightly together in an 83 minute runtime with bombastic action sequence and a narrative about a protagonist reconciling with a violent past he has tried to leave behind, it’s a movie that isn’t quite able to live up to its evident potential.

It has a distinct and welcomed flavor in the subgenre of “ordinary guy turns out to be an elite ass-kicker,” and it has an effective buoyancy that can in part be credited to the charisma of its two biggest stars, but it’s too brisk for its own good and leaves too much on the table. I surprise even myself bemoaning brevity in an age of bloat, but Love Hurts is also just too thin to do everything that it wants to do.

Doing a bit of well-earned post-Oscar strutting with his first lead role in a feature film, Ke Huy Quan stars as Marvin Gable, an infinitely affable and kind Wisconsinite realtor who finds true joy in his ability to help people find their perfect new home. It’s a life that he is passionate about… and one that is threatened to be completely torn down when he receives a very special Valentine’s Day card in the mail.

Years before, Marvin worked as a violent enforcer for his crime boss brother Alvin 'Knuckles' Gable (Daniel Wu), but he was given his freedom from the job in exchange for executing suspected traitor Rose Carlisle (Ariana DeBose). Marvin spared her life in exchange for a promise that she would disappear forever, but when she breaks her word while orchestrating her own mission of revenge, the protagonist sees himself targeted by his sibling so that Knuckles can get to Rose before Rose gets to him.

There is too much of the familiar in Love Hurts, and it outshines its doses of originality.

The biggest issue with Love Hurts can be described as a balance problem – which extends from the primary plot being a story that audiences have seen variations of dozens of times in the modern era since the release of Taken in 2009. At this point in the history of the action genre, I find it a challenge to get too excited about a likable, seemingly average guy proving himself a wild badass (even when that character is played by someone as disarming and wonderful as Ke Huy Quan).

But you know what I haven’t seen a lot of? An aimless and depressed assistant at a real estate firm (Lio Tipton) who reads a book of original poetry and thus falls in love with a knife-and-dart chucking assassin who has been hired to kill her boss (Mustafa Shakir). I’m likewise compelled by the crime boss goon who is distracted from his job because of the potential dissolution of his marriage. These are fun B-plots, but they don’t get the attention they deserve while the film focuses on the familiar.

Love Hurts gives Ke Huy Quan a role he was born to play, but I wanted more of Ariana DeBose.

Well-treaded as the main plot may be, Love Hurts does successfully get the most out of Ke Huy Quan. It’s a trope character in the genre, but it’s also the kind of role that the actor is too perfectly suited to play at this point in his career. In addition to his impressive physical skills (previously on display in Everything Everywhere All At Once), his enthusiasm is effervescent, expressed as Marvin finds absolute joy in the life that he has managed to create for himself after earning freedom from his brother. His emotional display after winning a realtor of the year prize could feel goofy or cynical from another performer, but Quan has a genuine quality that makes your heart swell (and making only sweeter is that the sequence is that the character receives the award from his boss played by former Goonies co-star Sean Astin).

Love Hurts knows exactly what it has in Ke Huy Quan, but it also doesn’t give us nearly enough of Ariana DeBose’s Rose, with the character operating from the shadows for most of the story. When we do get to spend time with her, there is a dangerous spirit that can be recognized (getting a little too excited when discussing chopping off a former associate’s finger, for example), but it’s not an element that gets nearly enough exploration.

Without anything mind-blowing, Love Hurts features a number of fun fight sequences featuring cinematic flair.

Being an 87North production, Love Hurts’ big overall draw is its stunt work and fight sequences. In this regard, it doesn’t disappoint, but it also doesn’t elevate the mediocre script. There is an amusing and well-executed evolution in Marvin’s physicality, as a defensive approach becomes more aggressive as he gets further pulled into his old world, and Jonathan Eusebio demonstrates flair as a first time director – his best idea coming during a second act combat in a kitchen with a camera angle from inside a refrigerator.

The simple existence of Love Hurts as an original action movie in the modern landscape is nice, with so much of the genre dominated by franchises, but it’s too lean and too safe to make the impact it wants to make. It’s entertaining but underwhelming, and breezy but limited.