Flops like Paint Your Wagon and Holly Dolly! signaled the Roadshow musical had finally overstayed its welcome. Torture horror could not survive the Hostel and Saw franchises fizzling out. Now the John Wick era of action movies has come crumbling down thanks to Love Hurts. Theaters have been invaded the last decade by a smorgasbord of movies about middle-aged guys trying to leave their days of throwing fists behind them…only to get called back into action to dispose wacky bad guys with flowery personality traits. A deluge of gun-fu fighting ensues and also jokes. Lots of jokes. The original John Wick only had a smattering of dark humor. Its descendants (especially ones helmed by Wick co-director David Letich) have ramped up the quips and wacky gags.
Violent Night, The Fall Guy, Nobody, the list goes on and on. Now Love Hurts tries exploiting Oscar-winner Ke Huy Quan's endless charisma to give this subgenre some extra life. Not even the man responsible for eternally changing how we all think of the phrase “I would have loved to do laundry and taxes” can revive this tired action cinema mold. This style of punch-heavy filmmaking is cooked.
Jonathan Eusebio's directorial debut begins with Marvin Gable (Ke Huy Quan) happily living out his days as a Milwaukee realtor. However, his happy-go-lucky times shatter to pieces when he receives an ominous Valentine's card from former lawyer Rose (Ariana DeBose). Beyond being a lady that Gable had an immense crush on, she’s also somebody he was supposed to leave dead in the desert. Before he painted, er, sold houses, Gable worked for his crime lord brother Knuckles (Daniel Wu) as a bloodthirsty hitman. Rose was a target that Gable just couldn’t kill, though. He let her go before retiring from that life for good.
Now, Rose has come back and she’s eager to get some revenge on Knuckles. This has brought the world of organized crime back into Gable’s life, including the assassin The Raven (Mustafa Shakir) showing up at his office. An early confrontation between these two ominously indicates the lackluster visual qualities that keep undercutting Love Hurts. During this skirmish, The Raven tosses a deadly pointed feather at Gable like it’s a curved bullet from Wanted. Our hero tries tossing it back at The Raven. However, lacking The Raven's precision, it just falls to the floor. This gag could've elicited laughs if it manifested in one unblinking wide shot. Instead, Eusebio, cinematographer Bridger Nielson, and the editing team capture this gag in several clumsy shots, which just kills the comedic momentum.
Weird visual impulses like that keep creeping into Love Hurts. There’s another later gag involving Rose tasing Gable in front of applauding kids on a playground. It’s bizarrely executed, with the camera just cutting to a pair of previously unseen adolescent onlookers at the end of the scene. A similar lack of visual set-up informs a climactic fight set to a Barry White hit revealing, in its final moments, that this song is apparently playing diegetically through a heretofore non-existent jukebox. Love Hurts keeps knowing the punchlines and conclusions it wants to reach. However, the roads getting there are bumpy as heck. To make matters worse, the destinations are never inspired enough to compensate for the choppy build-up.
Worst of all, action sequences are sadly nothing to write home about. Gable carries a profound hesitation in resorting to his violent ways. This means that Ke Huy Quan’s gifts as a physical performer often never materialize. The few times Love Hurts deploys his spryness and agility, things briefly flicker to life. Tragically, those bursts of fun are few and far between in Matthew Murray, Josh Stoddard, and Luke Passmore's screenplay. For some reason, this trio isn’t interested in even making Love Hurts several action sequences hastily stitched together. Espionage and "twists" are instead the name of the game. The entire production suffocates under a whole lot of double-crosses and triple-crosses in the criminal underworld.
Lore's so omnipresent that Rhys Darby even appears as a scummy accountant relaying exposition in a pleasant New Zealand accent. The plot's overcomplicated nature is exemplified by how FOUR oversized evil henchmen contend with Gable and Rose. There are so many characters and moral allegiances to keep track of that Ke Huy Quan, his fight scene skills, and even the simplest action movie pleasures get lost in the shuffle. Why is Love Hurts enamored with Gable and Rose's terrible ADR narration hammering home their respective character arcs? I don’t want to hear Gable say “I love this new life” for the umpteenth time. I came here for punches!
It's so funny how features mimicking uber-successful movies often forget what made their inspirations work. In this case, the original John Wick had a straightforward story (former master assassin wants revenge for his murdered puppy). The dramatic stakes in this yarn were fully tangible. Dark humor gradually creeped into this project starting with a killer phone call gag. The proceedings weren’t overwhelmed with wacky broad jokes from the start. Love Hurts, meanwhile, only has narrative convolutions. These include brief non-linear digressions to the fateful day Gable spared Rose that we’re already well aware of. Meanwhile, its specific style of humor is overbearing from the get-go. That makes it difficult to buy that any real danger exists in this world.
These drawbacks leave Love Hurts a staggeringly miscalculated endeavor right down to how exteriors of Milwaukee’s suburbs are realized with the same level of shoddy green screen work from Megalopolis. Even an extended cameo from Sean Astin as Gable’s mentor and surrogate brother is incredibly disjointed. This casting, gratingly meant to appeal to Goonies fans, is so clumsily introduced that it can’t conceal its fan-service ambitions. The whole story grinds to a halt to both include this character and reaffirm Gable personality traits audiences already know about.
Cursory bits of fun occur in Love Hurts. Daniel Wu exudes a believable aura of menace as Knuckles. I liked how The Raven had these gigantic arm blades hidden away in his boots. Speaking of that character, a moment where he and Gable are being attacked by assassins inspires Gable to ask The Raven “we’re on the same side now, right?” before flashing a wide grin and thumbs up. This bit is the one instance where Love Hurts harmoniously combines Ke Huy Quan’s endearing demeanor and an edgier action movie persona. Otherwise, his violence-heavy shenanigans lack any personality.
These fugacious pieces of entertainment reinforce how the rest of Love Hurts is so snooze-worthy. How on Earth do you make Marshawn Lynch (here playing one of Knuckles’ henchmen) so lifeless considering how endlessly hysterical he was in Bottoms? Eusebio and company have found a way. Love Hurts isn’t just a badly concocted movie. It’s a harbinger that a subgenre has reached the end of the road. John Wick pastiches haven’t gone beyond being terrible. They’ve also lost the elegant simplicity, excitement, and bombast that made those four Wick installments so riveting. Rather than even just being Nobody 2.0, Love Hurts is the Paint Your Wagon of modern American action cinema.