Review: Love Hurts
You Can't Break Up With Your Past
INTRODUCTION
This is a quick review of the newly released film Love Hurts. Please note that this is just one of the many movies I will have watched each year, and my initial grade for this film may change over time, for better or worse. To stay up to date on my thoughts about other movies and any potential changes in my opinion on this one, follow me on Letterboxd.
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PLOT
Via Letterboxd: A realtor is pulled back into the life he left behind after his former partner-in-crime resurfaces with an ominous message. With his crime-lord brother also on his trail, he must confront his past and the history he never fully buried.
REVIEW
Ke Huy Quan was arguably THE story of the 2022 awards season as the former child star pulled off an incredible late-career comeback and won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for the first film role he took after years away from the screen. I was beyond happy to see Quan getting more roles afterward, whether it be voiceover work for animated features, his work on the second Loki miniseries, or upcoming film projects. And you can bet I was rooting for him hard when he was announced to be the lead in a new action-comedy, Love Hurts.
To what should be no one’s surprise, Quan is the MVP of the film. His ability to come off as an adorable and likable everyday guy while also pulling off incredible action and stunt sequences is what earned him his Oscar for Everything Everywhere All At Once, and those skills are apparent once again here. He is single-handedly keeping any interest I had in the movie alive as his character arc progresses.
Alongside Quan is an ensemble that includes another Oscar winner in Ariana DeBose as his love interest, his Goonies co-star Sean Astin as his realtor boss, Daniel Wu as the antagonist of the film and Quan’s character’s brother, Lic Tipton as a co-worker of his, and none other than NFL superstar Marshawn Lynch as one of the henchmen Quan’s character must face.
Astin does a solid job in his few scenes, as do Tipton and Wu (who has a pretty funny running gag about his affection for boba tea). Lynch, however, stands out once again, just as he did in 2023’s Bottoms, and it’s helped greatly by his chemistry with Edward Chapell, who plays his partner. As for DeBose, she tries really hard with the material given to her, but I found her character wanting.
The film’s score is nice, it has a fun soundtrack when utilized, and its action and stunts are legitimately the best technical aspects of the film. It helps having a lead like Quan who can pull these scenes off, but you can certainly at the very least give the movie props for how entertaining and well-shot these sequences are.
But it gives me no pleasure to say that Love Hurts is overall one of the biggest trainwrecks in butchering a film through excessive editing that I have ever seen. As good as some of the cast is, as great as the action sequences are, the film itself is a prime example of what happens when you try and cut a movie down too much. It’s only a little over 80 minutes long, and by the end, I felt like I had watched a movie that was missing key scenes. There were emotional beats to this film that never stood a chance of feeling earned because of the brutal cuts made in the editing room.
And the frustrating thing is that there is a really fun action comedy in here somewhere. We see hints of Quan having a business rival who supposedly has a black belt, Lynch and his partner seemingly on a hilarious quest around town trying to find Quan while one of them is trying to save his marriage, Quan’s co-worker falling for one of the henchmen sent to kill him, etc. The problem is we only get snippets of those storylines, making the film feel unfinished.
I don’t blame Ke Huy Quan for me not liking this movie. He truly is the MVP. Hell, most of the cast is doing great work with what they’re given. But the cast, all the great action and stunts, and a few moments that got a chuckle out of me can’t patch over this movie being a disaster in editing, pacing, story arcs, and thin plotting. I really wanted to have fun with Love Hurts in the same way I did with something like The Fall Guy, but I can’t ignore where this project falters. I give Love Hurts a mediocre and hurtful-to-give C+.
GRADING
