Love Hurts is the sort of movie that, under most circumstances, I would have gone to see when it was new in theaters. Yes, I was a little wary that it only had one trailer–rarely a good sign–or that it came out in February, but I would have gone anyway. However, my girlfriend wanted to see it because she was enchanted by lead actor Ke Huy Quan’s role on Disney+’s Loki and the trailer was amusing. But finding time for both of us to get to see anything can sometimes be tricky, and Love Hurts didn’t stay in theaters very long. It’s on Peacock now, and I just about never watch Peacock. It was on an annual renewal I generally forgot to cancel, and all I know is I only have it until sometime in June. Our time was limited, so we went for it.
Peacock told me that Nobody was next in the queue if we wanted to see more, and I said out loud that that Nobody is an actual good movie, so draw your own conclusions.
Nerdy realtor Marvin Gables (Quan) is living the life he says means the most to him, but then a mystery woman, Rose (Ariana DeBose) starts spreading Valentine’s Day cards around town that threaten to bring Marvin’s past back. Once upon a time, Marvin was the muscle for his brother Knuckles (Daniel Wu), a local crime boss. Knuckles had a rule that anyone who stole from him had to die, and when Rose appears to have taken money from Knuckles, Marvin was sent off to kill her. Instead, Marvin let her go, left the criminal life behind, and became the opposite of what he once was. And all that was because Marvin was in love with Rose.
Now, Knuckles knows Rose is alive and sends an outside hitman, the poetically-inclined killer The Raven (Mustafa Shakir), and while Marvin doesn’t want to hurt a soul, he does have certain long-abandoned skills. But it turns out Rose was framed for the theft by Knuckles’s right-hand man Merlo (Cam Gigandet), who knows that Knuckles’s desire to talk to Rose first will be bad for him, so he sends two other, more hapless hitman, Otis (André Eriksen) and King (Marshawn Lynch), to kill Rose and maybe Marvin first. Rose, meanwhile, needs Marvin to be his old self if the two of them are going to get out of this mess alive. Can Marvin channel his old badass self to save the pair?
I said above that I said out loud that the next movie on Peacock (which we did not watch) was a good one, and though my girlfriend hasn’t seen Nobody, she and I both agreed that Love Hurts wasn’t that good either. However, we didn’t think it was a complete loss. Quan is a charming lead, and some of the supporting characters were amusing. The Raven and Marvin’s assistant Ashley (Lio Tipton) have this unlikely romance going that largely works, and the Raven is the sort of eccentric character I would want to see in a movie like this. King and Otis are both funny in their own ways, and the generally-reliable Rhys Darby’s brief turn as Knuckles’s accountant has a nice moment here and there for his brief role. The fight scenes largely work and even have some neat POV shots and creative moments.
But then there’s the rest of the movie. Knuckles isn’t really the main antagonist for most of the movie. He does some dark things, but the way the plot is set up, Merlo is the real villain. But Merlo and Knuckles are both bland characters that are just evil because they are. There are moments of dialogue that made me think there were lines and scenes that were supposed to appear earlier in the movie that hit the cutting room floor and ultimately just felt odd. I could not understand how, if Marvin and Rose were supposed to be in hiding from Knuckles, neither seemed to change their name, and Marvin for one never left town. The movie has a low body count, and most of those deaths were to characters that didn’t really deserve to die, one just for an (admittedly amusing) punchline moment. Worst of all is DeBose, an actress who for the most part seems to fail to leave any impression on me save for her Oscar-winning performance in West Side Story. Aside from being a physically-attractive woman, neither my girlfriend nor I could figure out what Marvin saw in her. Her affection for him is likewise kinda vague, but at least Quan is a charming screen presence, so it’s easier to overlook. DeBose is just kinda there, and that more or less describes this movie to a T.
Grade: C-
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