James Berardinelli review - * out of ****

https://www.reelviews.net/reelviews/love-hurts

I approached Love Hurts with modest expectations. The well-worn concept – that of a retired assassin forced back into action to save the woman he loves – feels like a high-floor/low-ceiling concept: the kind of thing that’s never going to be great but also seems impossible to mess up. Undemanding, uninspired entertainment. Somehow, however, first-time director Jonathan Eusebio and his crew manage to bungle the un-bungle-able. This is a painfully bad movie that thinks it’s trying to be Jackie Chan-meets-John Wick and flies so far wide of the target that it might have been shot by a blind man. The “funny” moments fail to generate laughter and the “action” scenes are badly staged, poorly shot, ineptly choreographed, and ultimately boring. As for the acting…well let’s just say that former NFL great Marshawn Lynch is one of the better performers.

It’s hard to say whether the screenplay – credited to the trio of Matthew Murray, Josh Stoddard, and Luke Passmore – was always this threadbare or whether it was sliced and diced along the way. The resultant script feels more like the summary of a movie than a feature-length film. Character relationships are perfunctory and undeveloped (including the central ones), subplots wither on the vine, and there are enough gaps to build landfills in. It also doesn’t help that the actors playing the star-crossed lovers, Ke Huy Quan and Ariana DeBose, have so little chemistry that they couldn’t start a fire in a drought-stricken field on a bone-dry day.

But surely the fight scenes redeem things, if only a little, right? That’s a reasonable expectation considering that director Eusebio earned this job after spending 25 years working in the stunt department, first as a double then more recently as a fight/martial arts coordinator. He has films like The Avengers, John Wick, and The Fall Guy on his resume. Unfortunately, Eusebio mostly lets us down. Oh, there are a few highlights – a couple of interesting perspectives during a fight scene (looking out of a microwave oven and refrigerator) and a pretty clever kill shot late in the proceedings – but not nearly enough. Mostly, the action scenes seemed designed and edited to obfuscate the physical limitations of the actors. They’re neither amusing nor exciting. They lack energy and originality. To use a common term in today’s vernacular, they’re “meh.”

The narrative focuses on Marvin Gable (Ke Huy Quan), a one-time feared assassin who has remade himself as a suburban realtor. But his new lifestyle is threatened when his former boss (and bullying big brother), Knuckles (Daniel Wu), learns that Marvin didn’t finish his final assignment, which involved killing a lawyer-who-knew-too-much, Rose Carlisle (Ariana DeBose). Now Rose is back and Knuckles is pissed. And, because Marvin loves Rose, he refuses to betray her and circumstances won’t allow him to stay on the sidelines. Knuckles brings in a trio of hitmen – poetry-writing Raven (Mustafa Shakir), and bickering partners King (Marshawn Lynch) and Otis (Andre Eriksen) – to eliminate Marvin and Rose, but all their arrival does is reawaken the killer that Marvin has kept suppressed.

Any hope that the movie might start trending in the right direction is quickly squashed. It’s evident within the first 10 minutes that this is going to be a dog. Some directors are masters of managing tonal inconsistencies, switching between hardcore action and dark comedy with ease (Tarantino and the Coen Brothers come to mind but they’re far from the only ones). Eusebio is not among their number. Most of the film’s attempts at absurdity come across and juvenile and forced – bits that might work in a Police Squad! movie but nowhere else. An entire subplot about a romance between Raven and Marvin’s high-strung assistant, Ashley (Lio Tipton), is so unfunny that I can’t figure out how it remained in the shooting script.

I feel sorry for Ke Huy Quan and Ariana DeBose. Quan deserves something better as his follow-up to an Oscar-winning performance (although I think I said the same thing decades ago about Cuba Gooding Jr.). And DeBose has similarly fallen into a quality hellhole since the Academy honored her. One would think that, considering the pedigree of these two, they’d be able to salvage something from this scrapyard of a motion picture but that proves to be a lost hope. Yes, love may hurt, but perhaps not as much as sitting through this movie.