'Love Hurts' Feels Good

Ke Huy Quan stars in this brisk, surprisingly entertaining action-comedy.

The bad news about the new action-comedy Love Hurts is that it doesn’t have a surprising story, profound characters, belly laughs, or genuine romance.

The good news about the new-action comedy Love Hurts is just about everything else.

The movie stars Ke Huy Quan - the child actor (Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, Goonies) turned Oscar winner (Everything Everywhere All at Once) - as Marvin Gable, a seemingly mild-mannered real estate broker selling homes in the suburbs. Thing is, once upon a time, Marvin was the top killer for his crime lord brother, Knuckles (Daniel Wu). Marvin betrayed his brother, though, after being ordered to execute Rose (Ariana DeBose), an accountant who stole from Knuckles, and for whom Marvin harbored secret romantic feelings; instead of killing Rose, he set her loose, instructed her to disappear so his brother couldn’t find her, and reformed himself under the mentorship of a cowboy mini-mogul named Cliff (Quan’s Goonies co-star, Sean Astin).

But Marvin’s past comes back to kick him in the tush after Rose rears her not-so-ugly head again, determined to reclaim her former life; now Marvin and Rose have to evade an array of hitmen and gonifs.

Love Hurts is the directorial debut of Jonathan Eusebio, a former stuntman; it was produced by David Leitch, who was also a stuntman before he and another former stuntman, Chad Stahelski, co-directed the original John Wick (although DGA technicalities prevented Leitch from taking an onscreen credit for that film; Stahelski went on to direct the subsequent John Wicks solo, while Leitch helmed flicks like Deadpool 2 and The Fall Guy). So, naturally, the action sequences are the best parts of Love Hurts. Eusebio, it’s safe to say, is a student of Hong Kong kung fu classics. He stages each set piece with the silent film slapstick skill we used to expect from Jackie Chan’s collaborations with Stanley Tong. They’re quick, clever, and balletic.

Speaking of quick: Love Hurts clocks in at a gloriously brisk 83 minutes. Other movies, please take note.

The short run time, and the amount of that running time devoted to punching, kicking, and shooting, means the characters in Love Hurts are razor-thin archetypes and little more. That’s okay, though, ‘cause the movie is so well cast, it works as a kind of shorthand (as good casting tends to do). It’s not hard to buy Quan as a decent guy or DeBose as a badass, because that’s already how we think of these performers (in fact, this is the best use of DeBose since she won an Oscar for 2021’s West Side Story, after which she has been exclusively misused for dreck like Kraven the Hunter). When Sean Astin walks in and has all of 60 seconds to demonstrate that his and Quan’s characters are besties, we go with it, because we’ve all seen Goonies.

Ditto believing Rhys Darby as a cowardly scumbag, or former NFL star Marshawn Lynch as a loquacious, opinionated, and hubristic hitman. In 2023, Lynch practically stole the queer teen comedy Bottoms right out from under Ayo Edebiri and Rachel Sennott, and he all but steals Love Hurts out from under Quan and DeBose here. The dude is simply a comedic force of nature… so much so that it’s easy to forgive a cheesy “Beast Mode” joke made right before he tackles someone.

There are a lot of cheesy jokes in Love Hurts - sitcom-level zingers you’ll see coming a mile away (there are three credited screenwriters - Matthew Murray & Josh Stoddard and Luke Passmore - but it seems impossible that it could’ve taken more than one adolescent to dream any of this stuff up). The movie gets more amusing mileage from Lynch’s character commenting on Marvin’s martial arts skills than, say, an absurdist subplot about a burgeoning romance between Marvin’s assistant (Lio Tipton) and a sensitive assassin who writes poetry on the side (Mustafa Shakir), which comes complete with a totally random Sixteen Candles sight gag. But, again: because the movie is short, because the cast is so charming, and because the fights are so fun, Love Hurts manages to skate by. Maybe you won’t LOL, but you’ll consistently grin, and that ain’t nuthin’.