“Love Hurts” is plagued by commitment issues. The romantic action comedy wants to be a throwback exploitation programmer with a modern sheen but isn’t invested in the romance, action, or even the comedy it’s trying to sell. That reality is all the more apropos, considering the film follows the unassuming Marvin Gable (Ke Huy Quan), a former hitman turned realtor whose days of offering soulless suburban homes to prospective owners are threatened by his past. The reemergence of these ghosts forces Marvin to question if, on top of marketing houses, he also sold a fake life to himself. Such a shell game for a premise is a tell. Despite Quan’s best efforts, there isn’t one square foot of this tepid film worth buying.
It’s a grave slip and tumble for first-time director Jonathan Eusebio, who most recently served as fight coordinator on David Leitch’s star-powered SXSW headliner “The Fall Guy.” With the backing of Leitch—who also produced “Nobody” and “Violent Night”—Eusebio had probably hoped for an easy transition into the director’s chair. Unfortunately for Eusebio, “Love Hurts” sputters, then careens into a wall known as an unmitigated disaster. His blurred fight scenes lack punch, and the film’s crowd-displeasing tone wears even the most love-sick viewer down. An overworked yet somehow threadbare script appears to be cheating for length by exponentially increasing its font size, making it not altogether clear if the film’s stars are simply miscast or have been saddled with the most insipid dialogue imaginable.
“Love Hurts” bumbles between being “Rumble in the Bronx” and an ode to ’70s exploitation cinema. Before falling short of those aims, this cloying film tries to introduce an inoffensive Marvin as the nicest guy in the world. Sporting spectacles and a kitschy sweater, Marvin bakes pink heart-shaped cookies, admires his garden gnome, and bikes to work, where, along the way, he recycles littered cans. His awe-shucks manner, matched by his realtor slogan, “I want a home for you,” acts as an extension of the same lovable persona Quan cultivated with “Everything Everywhere All at Once.” Quan’s sunny disposition, unfortunately, is perpetually blotted out by the arrhythmic editing. When Marvin calls his morose assistant, Ashley (Lio Tipton), the jumping back and forth between the pair seems engineered to undercut the amiable foundation Quan is attempting to build.
During the overstretched 83-minute runtime, Quan never finds a suitable foil for his bubbly personality. In a reunion of “The Goonies,” Sean Astin, as Marvin’s homespun cowboy boss, has one meaty scene but not much else. Mustafa Shakir appears as a poetic hired gun reduced to a lone, repetitive punchline. Marshawn Lynch and Otis André Eriksen watch their fun give-and-go as buddy assassins hunting Quan chopped to bits by Eusebio’s persistent cutting around Lynch.
But the biggest disappointment is Ariana DeBose as Marvin’s long-lost flame, Rose Carlisle. Years ago, Marvin’s underworld brother Knuckles (Daniel Wu) dispatched him to murder the company’s lawyer, Rose, for stealing money. But Marvin let her live and calmed his killer instincts. With her return, marked by her sending Valentine’s Day letters, Knuckles and his underling Remy (Cam Gigandet) now aim to murder her and Marvin. While DeBose wants to be a sultry femme fatale (her character’s motto is “hiding isn’t living”), she lacks the sultry edge required to fill such a role. After playing half-baked characters in “Kraven the Hunter” and “Argylle,” one wonders what happened to DeBose. In Steven Spielberg’s “West Side Story,” the light seems to bend differently around her. Now, there appears to be no light within her at all.
“Love Hurts” also isn’t an emotionally believable film. Let’s think about its central throughline: When Rose arrives to reawaken Marvin, we’re meant to accept that he desperately wants to hold onto his new life selling real estate. I’m not here to knock anyone’s dreams. But selling vapid, cookie-cutter homes on a lifeless cul-de-sac without a pet or a partner to come home to doesn’t sound like something worth facing an army of assassins to protect (at least Gena Davis in “The Long Kiss Goodnight” had an emotional stake in being reunited with her daughter). And yet, Marvin initially rejects Rose and still attempts to return to his hum-drum job because he wants to feel normal. Looking at his beige life, I’d say that normal, in this case, looks like purgatory.
But maybe Marvin’s hesitancy to be with Rose is for the best? Quan and DeBose are far from an idyllic romantic pairing. Their intended steam thins into hot air in a film far too frightened to turn up the sensual heat. So much of what makes great chemistry arises from bodies transmitting to each other in space, eyes communicating desire, and the eros that bubbles under shared silence. But Eusebio gets the explain-itis, spoon-feeding the audience both Marvin and Rose’s innermost thoughts via voiceover with such frequency their love becomes impossible to imagine.
Worst yet, for an action film, I can think of very few satisfying deaths or memorable fights in “Love Hurts.” Eusebio looks frightened of kills and allergic to allowing the sterling fight choreography to breathe visually. Despite a score filled with wah-wah guitars and swirling strings soundtracking big-bad scenes dipped in neon, a desire for cleanliness causes this faux-exploitation picture to grind down its seediness into a flat, unspectacular aesthetic that suggests stylistic cosplaying rather than colorful filmmaking. It’s all emblematic of how Hollywood knows the ingredients of action cinema but has totally forgotten the measurements.
In theaters tonight, February 6.
