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Winning an Academy Award may be the peak of an actor’s career, not only because they are honored by an iconic gold statue in front of their gussied-up peers and a worldwide TV audience, but because the Oscar curse might come for them soon after. This bit of Hollywood superstition declares that after the heady high of an Oscar win, many an actor will suffer either a personal scandal, a box office bomb, or an inexplicable dry spell in casting. Now, you might well scoff at the idea of an Oscar curse, but Love Hurts, which co-stars recent Oscar winners Ke Huy Quan (Everything Everywhere All At Once) and Ariana DeBose (West Side Story) could make you believe.
On its surface, Quan’s casting in Love Hurts seems a no-brainer, as it capitalizes on what the child star turned leading man brought to the Best Picture–winning Everything Everywhere All At Once: the superb ability to perform character and comedy through stunt scenes. That DeBose, who dazzled as the passionate Anita in Steven Spielberg’s West Side Story, was cast as his co-star, should have been gravy. However, this action-comedy set on Valentine’s Day is a catastrophic mess of fight scenes, quirky characters, and an aggravating lack of vision from first-time director Jonathan Eusebio.
Good action isn’t enough to make Love Hurts work.
Credit: Universal Pictures
Quan stars as Marvin Gable, a real estate agent with a gleeful determination to find the perfect home for his client. However, before he was regional realtor of the year (a certificated honor of which he is comically proud), Marvin was a hitman for his suave but merciless boba tea-swigging brother Knuckles (American Born Chinese‘s Daniel Wu). The past he happily left behind comes back to bite him in the foxy form of Rose Carlisle (DeBose), the one that got away. And by that, I mean she is both the love of his life and the hit he faked to save her life. Back with a vengeance, Rose wants Knuckles and his crew to pay for trying to off her, but Marvin just wants to keep his cozy life — and his co-workers and clients — safe from his brother’s wrath. Much violence ensues.
To the credit of stunt coordinator turned director Eusebio, Love Hurts‘ fight scenes are varied and amusing. There’s hand-to-hand combat, knife throwing, gunfights, and domestic improvisational weapons like cookie cutters and a set of wall ornaments shaped like a giant fork and spoon. Further whimsy is woven in through motivation. While the assassins sent after Rose and Marvin are out for blood, Marvin just wants to get away — ideally with his crush and his treasured certificate intact. Props to the stunt team led by Can Aydin, the shift between actors and stunt doubles is pretty seamless. The actors’ faces embrace the film’s wacky tone with big expressions of shock, pain, and excitement as they battle, which is mirrored in the physicality throughout.
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The blows hit convincingly, and gruesomely. Coming from Nobody and Violent Night‘s producer David Leitch, Love Hurts shares those action offerings’ thirst for blood. And just as I found the broad comedy and gore jarring in those movies, it hits oddly here. One moment, you’ve got Sean Astin (in a charming Goonies reunion) delivering a heart-warming speech about the power of second chances, and in the next, Eusebio hits audiences with a grisly murder in close-up, with a visual gag that is gag-worthy. After the spirited dildo fight and overall embrace of weirdness and warmth of Everything Everywhere All At Once, this kind of violence feels a bit like a sucker punch.
Ke Huy Quan and Ariana DeBose deserve better.
Credit: Universal Pictures
As he did in Everything Everywhere All At Once, Quan is given the chance to play different iterations of Marvin. The foremost is the redeemed realtor, who is full of good advice and love for his fellow man. But in flashbacks, we see a mustachioed Marvin, whose physicality is not loose and light but hard and intimidating. There’s a thrill in seeing Quan transform, as he did in the swooning alley-set scene in Everything Everywhere All At Once. But the script by Matthew Murray, Josh Stoddard, and Luke Passmore only offers us a taste of this enticing transformation. So much of Love Hurts feels like a thin variant on the role that won Quan the Oscar. Why watch this when a better version of this movie is already streaming?
As for DeBose, this is the latest in a string of post-Oscar win duds, which includes Disney’s cringingly synergizing Wish, the dunderheaded spy comedy Argylle, and Sony’s latest Spider-Man spinoff flop Kraven: The Hunter. (No shade to the indie horror thriller House of Spoils — it slaps.) In Love Hurts, as in Kraven and Argylle, she plays a stylish badass, who has incredible skills but remains a sidekick to the hero. To DeBose’s credit in Love Hurts, she tries to make the most out of a character who is a clumsy amalgamation of clichés pulled from film noir, blaxploitation flicks, and gangster movies. As Rose, she has a convincing swagger and a mischievous glint in her eye. But neither Quan nor DeBose can elevate a script that feels achingly like an early draft, peppered with too many paper-thin characters, obvious twists, and a final reveal that’s so out of nowhere one might assume a whole subplot got sloppily scrapped.
The film moves at a relentless pace, but not in terms of generating tension. Loaded with voiceover — from both Marvin and Rose — there’s barely a moment without exposition-dumping, dialogue, or fight sounds. It’s as if the filmmakers so fear the audience will lose interest that they can’t allow any emotional beats the space to actually land. This undercuts not only the headliners but also a supporting cast that shines with promise. Among them, Lio Tipton thrills as a millennial realtor going through a hilarious existential crisis, while Mustafa Shakir proves swoon-worthy as a poetic hitman called the Raven. Astin brings a reliable warmth and aforementioned speeches as a cowboy-hatted friend of Marvin’s. Drew Scott kicks into action as a rival realtor with a hero complex, and Marshawn Lynch brings back that wild card Bottoms energy as another determined hitman. But you can feel the desperation of the filmmakers when he screams out his real life nickname — “Beast Mode” — while barreling into action.
Indeed, the whole third act feels like it was written in post-production. Much of the finale dialogue between the warring brothers happens when the person speaking is not facing the camera, suggesting an aggressive use of ADR (additional dialogue recording). This a big red flag that Love Hurts lost its way in the making, and little wonder that tonally the movie is all over the place, scene to scene, moment to moment. Even at 83 minutes, it’s a slog due to the aching lack of cohesion. Still, any good actor can make a bad movie. So why bring the Oscar curse into it? Well, because there’s an element of the Oscar curse that’s too often overlooked.
Hollywood still doesn’t know what to do with actors of color.
DeBose, who is Afro-Latina, went from playing arguably the most iconic Latina role in Hollywood cinema (shout out to the first Oscar–winning Anita, Rita Moreno) to playing a string of “strong female” sidekicks. The moxie she showed in West Wide Story, the passion displayed in her Oscar acceptance speech, and the whimsy she delivered in her infamous BAFTA rap, should have opened a floodgate of leading roles for her, as her range was clear. But instead we get Kraven and Love Hurts.
With his Everything Everywhere All At Once promotional campaign, Quan reclaimed the hearts of movie fans, some of whom saw him first as the dynamic kid sidekick Short Round in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. We cheered for his rousing comeback, thrilled when he got cast on Loki. But for his first leading man turn post-Oscar, it’s deeply disappointing that this is all he gets. Sure, it could have been capitalizing on what we loved about that role. Here he gets to do comedy, action, and romance. But for all their charms, Quan and DeBose have zero sexual chemistry, so their characters’ insistence that they are madly in love always rings hollow.
The whole film works this way, offering spectacle but no depth. So while Love Hurts delivers bursts of thrills and fun, it is overall a mind-numbing miss.
Love Hurts opens in theaters Feb. 7.
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Academy Award winners Ke Huy Quan and Ariana DeBose flop hard in this action-comedy. Film review.
