Love Hurts Review

Love Hurts opens in theaters Friday, February 7.

Love Hurts is what rock critics used to call a “bastard love child.” Mate the mayhem of John Wick with the boogie of Quentin Tarantino and out pops an annoyingly quirky offspring. David Leitch, the former stuntman who produced this labored action-comedy, dabbled in such designer breeding a few years ago in his flashy IMAX caper Bullet Train, spiking a shallow gene pool of Pulp Fiction knockoffs with some kung-fu choreography. Love Hurts is like a runt from the same litter – shorter, a little gentler, but possessed of matching dominant traits. You can, once again, expect the hitmen to trade banal chitchat when not engaged in brutal, acrobatic, hand-to-hand combat.

As in Nobody, the 2021 Leitch concoction starring Bob Odenkirk as an unassuming ex-hit man, a wolf comes in sheep’s clothing. He is Marvin Gable (Ke Huy Quan), a relentlessly upbeat realtor securing dream homes for happy couples in a conspicuously Canadian stretch of American suburbia. (The film was shot in Winnipeg, but it’s set nowhere in particular.) First seen removing heart-shaped cookies from the oven, Marvin floats through his days on a cloud of positivity and professional satisfaction. What his coworkers don’t know is that this softie is secretly a Wickian badass – a reformed killing machine whose old life and bloody career come violently knocking.

This is Quan’s first headlining role since his triumphant comeback in the metaphysical, multiversal Everything Everywhere All at Once – a more imaginative genre pastiche, to put it mildly. In that film, the former child star grounds the reality-jumping lunacy with his vulnerability. Here, he’s stuck playing a walking punchline: the angel of death less interested in moldering bodies than crown moulding. Love Hurts keeps yanking the character into reluctant brawls, like the one where he trades blows with an assassin behind an office’s frosted glass walls, poking his head out between bouts of combat to flash an all-is-well grin. But there’s no actual glimmer of darkness to Marvin; the reveal that he used to kill people for a living doesn’t compute, because Quan plays him like a cuddly wrong man guilelessly dodging blows and blades.

The plotting of this oddly paced, farcical noir of murderous knuckleheads is somehow both convoluted and arbitrary. It involves Marvin getting pulled back, against his will, into the orbit of his brother and former employer, the goofily monikered, boba-craving kingpin Knuckles (Daniel Wu). (He finds a deadly use for his favorite treat’s signature wide straw during one of a few scenes that tips the film’s wonky tonal balance from sweet to sour.) The anchor of Love Hurts, which is opening just in time for Valentine’s Day, is meant to be Marvin’s unconsummated, possibly reciprocated feelings for sultry nightclub dame Rose (Ariana DeBose), who’s reemerged years after he helped her escape the life. But the romance between these recent Oscar winners never sparks, maybe because DeBose – who plays Rose as arch as a quotation mark – overcranks the campy vampiness. Overcompensating for this pointed absence of chemistry, first-time director Jonathan Eusebio supplies both characters with periodic, clunky voice-over narration – a way for them to simply state their feelings and motivations aloud. (“I know I have to face my past to truly be free,” Quan at one point murmurs.)

You get the distinct impression that full passages of Love Hurts were left on the editing-room floor en route to a mercilessly trim 80 minutes. Nevertheless, stunt veteran Eusebio stages the close-quarters showdowns with clarity and verve. But there’s nothing in the action department that we haven’t seen before and better. While Bullet Train pushed the Wick school of mechanically precise gun- and knife-play to a slapstick peak of intentional self-parody, Love Hurts never gets past the supposed hilarity of Marvin dipping out of the crossfire for a second to play smiling realtor again.

If that running gag doesn’t leave you in stitches, maybe the gallery of cartoon lowlifes will. We get Rhys Darby as a mewling Kiwi mob accountant, André Eriksen and former football star Marshawn Lynch as sitcom goons, and Mustafa Shakir as a hired gun whose sensitive poetry – he throws feathered daggers, the pen being mightier than the sword and all – helps him improbably woo Marvin’s harried assistant (Lio Tipton). The movie even finds room for a groan-inducing cameo by one of the Property Brothers. Love Hurts may take its more bruising cues from the school of visceral East-meets-West actioners that Leitch helped popularize, but it’s just as close in spirit to the sardonic crime larks that cropped up like weeds in the aftermath of Pulp Fiction. You know, the kind that made film lovers want to get medieval on Hollywood’s ass.

But Love Hurts doesn’t really step into Tarantino Land until the climax, when the action shifts to the villain’s video-store headquarters, a veritable amusement-park lair of cult memorabilia. Here, the walls are lined with posters for imaginary kung-fu movies, a Mortal Kombat II cabinet flashes and plinks, and a jukebox supplies the inevitable final fight with some ironically sweet Motown accompaniment. Is that Marvin Gaye we hear before horns and whistles create a counterfeit Ennio Morricone vibe? Our hero had to get his name from somewhere, though at least one other unlucky Marvin leaps to mind, too.