In his first live-action film appearance since winning an Oscar for Everything Everywhere All at Once, comeback kid Ke Huy Quan has chosen a movie that recycles the earlier one’s hit formula. Martial arts action plays out incongruously in quotidian locations; life lessons are combined with close-quarter combat. One difference is Love Hurts’s gloating reliance on gore: a hand is impaled with a knife, a pen is buried in a man’s eyeball, teeth stick to the duct tape ripped from a hostage’s mouth. It all rather puts the “ick” in karate kick.
Quan plays Marvin Gable, a realtor whose chirpiness conceals his past as a hitman for his crime-boss brother Knuckles (Daniel Wu). For his last job before going straight, Marvin was asked to kill Rose (Ariana DeBose), his one-time sweetheart who stole millions from the mob. But he took mercy, and now she’s back. Tired of lying low (“Hiding ain’t living,” she says), Rose is out to take revenge on those who wronged her, among them a snivelling accountant played by Rhys Darby of Flight of the Conchords, and to rekindle affections with her old flame. Well, it’s Valentine’s Day after all, as Marvin’s voiceover keeps reminding us.
Sticking plasters adorn the cutesy opening credits, but it’s that intermittent narration that is the film’s own post-production Band-Aid. Clearly someone at the studio was concerned that the whole thing was descending into confusion, hence Marvin popping up to explain the plot or reiterate the themes. In one scene, narrating duties switch to Rose for no apparent reason, though mostly she goes around Tasering adversaries and not getting to join in properly with any of the fights; the film-makers seem to have decided that is men’s work. As Marvin’s fellow realtor Ashley, Lio Tipton does better. Swooning over a mystical, poetry-writing assassin named the Raven (Mustafa Shakir), whom she stumbles upon in the aftermath of a gruesome dust-up, she provides some of the romcom dopamine hits missing from the Rose/Marvin relationship.
First-time director Jonathan Eusebio has been a stunt coordinator for more than 20 years (his credits include various Bourne and John Wick films) so it’s no surprise that Love Hurts is at its most assured during the fight sequences, even if these are limited by the unvaryingly nondescript offices, suburban homes and empty clubs in which they are staged. It’s the bits in between that he can’t quite animate, though the interest of Goonies fans might be piqued by the reunion of Quan and Sean Astin, who plays his Stetson-wearing real-estate mentor.
In general though, the film is indebted, as Everything Everywhere was before it, to Edgar Wright’s Scott Pilgrim vs the World. A visual gag showing Marvin leaping over a series of garden fences suggests that Eusebio also admires Wright’s Hot Fuzz. As Valentine’s Day treats go, however, Love Hurts is the cinematic equivalent of a wilted bouquet from a petrol station forecourt.
• Love Hurts is out on 6 February in Australia, and on 7 February in the US and UK.
