Review: LOVE HURTS

 by Rob DiCristino

Gas leak cinema.

A few weeks back, there were rumblings in the cinema-going press about a new “second screen directive” sent by the Netflix brass to the various writing staffs working on their Original Content. According to rumors, writers were being advised to simplify their plots and increase the amount of expositional dialogue between characters in any given scene, making the Content easier to follow for viewers using Netflix as a “second screen,” or, in less generous terms, “something to have on in the background while they scroll on their phones.” Netflix denies ever issuing any directive of this kind, of course — even Netflix is canny enough not to openly admit any real culpability in the death of cinema — but it kept coming back to me as I watched Jonathan Eusebio’s Love Hurts, a noxious, ugly, addled, half-cocked, and dim-witted action-comedy that would have made these alleged Netflix executives explode in orgiastic delight. Critics were given a box of branded candy hearts at the screening, but a better gift package might have included a gas mask or a handgun.

Marvin Gable (Academy Award-winner Ke Huy Quan) is a real estate agent living and working in a small Milwaukee suburb. He’s a brilliant, good-natured salesman who always looks on the bright side, even when his assistant Ashley (Lio Tipton, Emma Stone’s lovechild with Aubrey Plaza) is consumed by eye-rolling negativity. His life is humming along just fine until an unsigned Valentine’s Day card — “With Love,” also the film’s original, more sensical title — triggers a series of events that bring him face-to-face with the past he thought he left behind. That past has something to do with the beautiful Rose (Academy Award-winner Ariana DeBose) and a knife-wielding warrior-poet called The Raven (Mustafa Shakir), both of whom are in some way connected to Marvin’s estranged brother, local crime boss Alvin “Knuckles” Gable (Daniel Wu). Why is Rose sending these valentines? What do they have to do with Marvin’s past? Why does Knuckles want revenge? Why does Marshawn Lynch keep cursing? Wait, Sean Astin is in this movie?

There are answers to these questions, of course, but not a single one of them justifies the eighty-three minutes of our time that Love Hurts has the unmitigated temerity to waste. It’s a movie held together with off-brand glue sticks and littered with the kind of inane voice-over that I can only assume represents the panicked intervention of an underpaid film editor. “How will we know that the amethyst stone on Marvin’s coffee table wards off bad dreams or that Rose is the one who gave it to him?” the editor must have asked while sifting through reels of misshapen footage. Realizing that his director had fucked off to Universal’s new Dark Universe amusement park, he likely took it upon himself to have DeBose record this clarification: “That’s an amethyst stone. It wards off bad dreams. I’m the one who gave it to you.” American literacy standards may be in the toilet, but at least we have movies like Love Hurts to make complicated concepts like “stones” and “dreams” and “what it means when someone gives you a gift” clearer and more manageable for the audience.

But let’s not pick nits. Surely Love Hurts has the basic narrative coherence necessary to inspire two Oscar winners to sign on. Hell, the trailer has Everything Everywhere All at Once vibes, and “assassin-turned-suburbanite” sounds like a perfect vehicle for Ke Huy Quan’s first leading role. And it’s true that Quan is largely innocent, especially in one charming fight scene where Marvin fends off assassins while protecting his framed “Agent of the Year” award. The award is a symbol of his new life — we know this because he tells Rose, “This award is a symbol of my new life” — and his effort to preserve it is a clear nod to the best of Jackie Chan’s Hong Kong cinema. Seeing Marvin uncork it after playing it so straight is also cathartic for the viewers, who are excited to see him return to the life he left behind. Trouble is, there’s no indication that Marvin ever wants to do that. He’s not harboring lingering urges toward violence. He doesn’t seem to miss his crime lord brother. You know how movie characters say things like, “Something’s missing”? Nothing’s missing.

But Love Hurts hopes you’ll be too distracted by its haphazard action and a running joke about Ashley and The Raven falling in love — the joke being that they’re falling in love, I guess? — to notice the thick layer of horseshit on which its foundations are built. This is a movie meant to be watched in clips on Tik Tok, really, where things like “character arcs” have no relevance and the galaxy-sized chemistry vacuum between Quan and DuBose will seem much smaller. Actually, a lot of the movie would work better on Tik Tok, including a late scene where Marvin goes full assassin to take on his brother’s goons: The music swells. He growls and poses. A cheerful Rose shouts, “Finally! There he is!” It’s all very exciting, but it would be a lot more effective had we not spent the last hour watching him kick the shit out of people all over town. Like everything else in Love Hurts, that moment has no weight because it makes no sense. But hey, we’re in the “second screen” era (era) now, when cinema is designed to be watched out of the corner of your eye. Does anyone even care?

Love Hurts is in U.S. theaters now.