Love Hurts

Ke Huy Quan has had a life story itself worthy of a Hollywood biopic: from Vietnamese refugee to a child blockbuster star to relative obscurity to his triumphant, Oscar-winning 2022 comeback with Everything Everywhere All At Once. Now once again booked and busy, Quan enjoys leading-man status for the first time in new action-comedy Love Hurts. What really hurts, though, is that the film doesn’t know how to make the most of him.

Quan plays Marvin Gable (yes, one syllable away from a famous love-song merchant), a real-estate agent who wears a sensible bicycle helmet, waves cheerfully to his neighbours, picks up litter in the park, and says things like “What the fudge?” instead of the ruder option. He loves his job, a true real-estate nerd. But Marvin, it quickly emerges, has a secret life: he is actually a reformed hitman, a former assassin forced to grapple with his violent past, a little like David Cronenberg’s A History Of Violence or Ilya Naishuller’s Nobody.

Ariana DeBose is described as the “kind of woman a man would remember”, yet her femme-fatale-facsimile is disappointingly thinly drawn.

As with Nobody, Love Hurts comes from 87North, the stunt-focused production company behind John Wick, and as you might expect, the action here is reliably slick. The early fight scenes — especially a frantic tussle in a kitchen, by some distance the film’s apex — seem to consciously channel Jackie Chan. Quan (a black belt in taekwondo) is breathlessly agile and acrobatic, and he makes it all feel fun and scrappy when availing himself of improvised weaponry while protecting his precious ‘Regional Realtor Of The Year’ certificate.

First-time director Jonathan Eusebio, a former stuntman, knows his way around a fight scene, but seems less sure how to handle an excess of exposition; the script, with three credited writers, quickly gets lost in the weeds of a needlessly convoluted plot, and despite having all the trappings of a comedy forgets to put in many actual jokes.

Few characters beyond Marvin make any lasting impression, either: Quan’s fellow Goonies brother-in-arms Sean Astin has a sweet turn, but everyone else seems to have been prefabricated in a Generic Bad Guy factory. Ariana DeBose — like Quan, a fellow Spielberg alum — is described as the “kind of woman a man would remember”, yet her femme-fatale-facsimile is disappointingly thinly drawn.

Most unforgivably, the film doesn’t fully utilise its greatest asset. As seen in Everything Everywhere, Quan has the remarkable versatility to switch between lovable goof and badass action star, between charmingly silly and deeply heartfelt. He gives it his all here (one scene nicely evinces his earnestly emotional side) even as the film around him never quite hangs together. Love Hurts doesn’t live up to its potential — but it can’t stop Ke Huy Quan’s unstoppable trajectory.