Energetic Action-Comedy Love Hurts is a Disastrous Waste of Time
If nothing else, Love Hurts has the dubious distinction of being the first new release of 2025 that made me visibly upset. This picture seems determined to waste every ounce of its massive potential, including a colorful ensemble, an engaging central premise, and several outstanding fight sequences that are choreographed, performed, shot, and edited to near perfection. It’s bad, but bad in a way only a project with so much glorious possibility could be, and that only makes things worse.
Mild-mannered Milwaukee realtor Marvin Gable (Ke Huy Quan) is not who he appears to be. Before he was an empathetic everyman who lived to put families into their first home, Marvin was a ruthless, unfeeling enforcer working for his equally cold-blooded crime lord brother Alvin, a.k.a. “Knuckles” (Daniel Wu). But he left his sibling’s side and vowed to become a better person after his last contract was to knock off their organization’s lawyer Rose Carlisle (Ariana DeBose), a woman he secretly loved.
The full plot offers up zero surprises. Granted, I think it’s safe to say trying to shock the audience with unexpected twists and turns was never in the playbook for director Jonathan Eusebio and the film’s trio of credited writers Matthew Murray, Josh Stoddard, and Luke Passmore. Instead, the action-comedy appears to be a vehicle to exhibit Quan’s intoxicating charms in his first above-the-title role while also unleashing a cadre of explosive martial arts-filled balletic showdowns that increase in creativity, intensity, and violence as the story progresses.
In theory that could be fine, but I still think you have to put at least a passing effort into making the remaining storytelling beats come off as, at a bare minimum, moderately interesting. That is not the case. Characters are tropes and types, not actual human beings. Comedic bits appear to have the potential to amuse only to meander towards a payoff that frustratingly never happens. Intriguing emotional elements go nowhere. Worst of all, the chemistry between Quan and DeBose is shockingly nonexistent, so the idea that either of them would sacrifice themselves for the other is impossible to believe.
The idea is that the assumed-dead Rose returns from the grave intending to free Marvin from Knuckles for good as well as reveal the identity of the person who framed her for stealing millions from their criminal organization. This leads to a bevy of hired assassins (portrayed by Mustafa Shakir, André Eriksen, and Marshawn Lynch) trying to get their hands on the duo. It also grants the filmmakers the opportunity to blur the two worlds Marvin is aggressively working to keep separate to hopefully comedic effect, especially as they relate to the realtor’s warmhearted boss Cliff Cussick (Sean Astin) and his pessimistically acerbic assistant Ashley (Lio Tipton).
Yet, as hard as all the actors try, precious little works. Even more annoying, it easily could have. Eriksen and Lynch — in all his self-effacing “Beastmode” glory — are a winning Mutt and Jeff team, and had they had material worthy of their camaraderie, they maybe could have stolen both my heart and the picture right out from underneath Quan and DeBose. Shakir and Tipton have their own subplot, their characters connecting during a goofily macabre “meet cute” that initially intrigued me. But what starts out with a whimsical twinkle in its eye quickly devolves into inexcusably vacuous nothingness. All four actors deserve better; none of them gets it.
An additional subplot involves Cam Gigandet as Renny Merlo, Knuckles’ smarmy second-in-command, but it’s a disaster. Suffice it to say, it goes nowhere, and Gigandet is entirely forgettable. Other than that? Nothing to see here. Move along. Move along.
Other than the stunning action sequences, there is one actor who does get out of all of this unscathed, and that’s Astin. Channeling his inner Dennis Hopper facing off against an impossibly overconfident Christopher Walken with the intent to make him look the fool he truly is, the former Goonie and Lord of the Rings trilogy star has rarely been better. Sitting across from an intensely irritated Wu, Astin delivers a mesmerizing portrait of resilience, friendship, sacrifice, and love that ripped my heart in two.
It’s the best part of the entire film. It also shines a giant, unflinching spotlight on the irritating shortcomings that the remaining non-action aspects of this production showcase in noxious spades.
However, if all anyone cares about is that action, then there is no denying the fight sequences are indeed phenomenal. Eusebio, a veteran fight and stunt coordinator who has worked on everything from The Matrix Resurrections to Violent Night to The Fall Guy to the John Wick franchise, knows what he’s doing at it shows. Quan, who when he stepped away from being in front of the camera in the 1990s became something of an unheralded stunt-coordinating force behind it before having his acting career resurrected by Everything Everywhere All at Once, is a fireball of athletic grace as he dispatches one villain after another with spellbinding urgency.
So what? None of it matters. There’s no reason to care. The pieces don’t fit. The tone is all over the map. The actors rarely get a chance to make a lasting impression. It feels bizarrely unfinished, almost as if all involved weren’t working from the first draft of a shooting script, but instead the most threadbare outline of one, bullet points and all.
Typically, I’m all for giving every film a second chance at some point down the road, but I’m fairly positive that won’t happen here. Even at a blink-and-it’s-over 83 minutes, it pains me to say it but Love Hurts is an agonizingly unappealing disaster. I didn’t like it. At all.
Film Rating: 1½ (out of 4)
