Love Hurts review – no love, much hurts

For super­sti­tious folk look­ing for new traces of proof that the so-called post-Oscar curse (the bad movie mis­for­tune that para­dox­i­cal­ly fol­lows Acad­e­my Award win­ners in the years fol­low­ing their win) con­tin­ues to haunt actors hold­ing onto their gold-plat­ed stat­uettes, look no fur­ther than the new action-com­e­dy, Love Hurts. As the lat­est vic­tim of the curse, Ke Huy Quan joins in on Ari­ana DeBose’s flop streak, his delight­ful screen pres­ence not near­ly enough to dis­tract from such a depress­ing­ly unin­spired film. 

Huy Quan plays the cheer­ful, seem­ing­ly hap­py-go-lucky Mar­vin Gable, a real estate agent who loves his job and the new life he’s built for him­self, until his past life as an assas­sin comes back to haunt him. It turns out that Mar­vin had dis­obeyed his crime lord broth­er, the pow­er-hun­gry Knuck­les (Daniel Wu) who in the past, had ordered him to kill Rose (Ari­ana DeBose), a woman who had stolen sev­er­al mil­lions from the mob. Mar­vin, being in love with Rose, took mer­cy and they both fled, going their sep­a­rate ways.

Back in the the present, as Mar­vin is look­ing through his mail while gear­ing up for the office Valentine’s Day par­ty, he notices a red card which sig­nals Rose’s return. Knuck­les gets one too, and orders his posse to get both her and his broth­er killed. And there’s not much else to this wafer-thin premise that pits the two broth­ers against each oth­er, as every pos­si­bil­i­ty for pathos is sti­fled by lazy writ­ing. None of these char­ac­ters leave any impres­sion at all, which is all too apro­pos when they have names like Knuck­les, Rose, King and Raven. 

At least there is ded­i­ca­tion to the spec­ta­cle of prac­ti­cal stunt work, owed to direc­tor Jonathan Eusebio’s back­ground as a sea­soned stunt per­former. Yet the action takes place against cor­po­rate and real estate show­room sets that are so sparse, con­stant­ly remind­ing us that this is a world that’s not lived in; that these are char­ac­ters with no tex­ture, no pur­pose oth­er than to des­per­ate­ly dog-pad­dle from one scene to the next. We arrive to every action scene exhaust­ed after being bom­bard­ed with expo­si­tion through con­trived voiceovers (ini­tial­ly Marvin’s, which makes sense, but then Rose chimes in too, because why not), hokey dia­logue and clichéd flash­backs. If the big Hol­ly­wood dogs are lis­ten­ing, they should real­ly head back to the draw­ing board and search for mean­ing­ful ways to cap­i­talise on their Oscar winners.