Love Hurts Review: Hurt Loves

Dig the stunt show, but these leads deserve more than that

As a fan, I love Ke Huy Quan and Ariana DeBose. Short Round was my hero as a kid – unlike his mentor Indiana Jones, he didn't have to kiss girls! – and DeBose is just adorable. I had occasion to meet both during awards season in the last couple of years, and they were as kind and generous with their time as you'd hope. Quan was as grateful for his second chance at acting as anyone, and DeBose was every bit the Disney princess that her unfairly savaged Wish had her playing; it was also cool to know she attended Western Carolina University for a year, a factoid I wish I could share with my father. It's also kind of awesome to me that WCU, not in the most tolerant of areas when I lived nearby, hosted someone who checks off so many diversity boxes and she liked it there. Sometimes, society does progress in the right direction.

But Love Hurts, as the title of their new movie says. Not as much as I feared it might – it's a decent enough stunt showcase with a good four or five fight sequences worth the price of admission. It's just not much more than that – the bits in between are trying so hard to be weird and eccentric that they feel more like desperate pleas for attention. Which, with these two stars, you don't need. At times it seems that perhaps reshoots were needed but not available, so the editor threw things into a blender and added lots of voice-over, David Lynch Dune style. If characters have to verbally explain what their motives are in a movie where the premise is “they screwed over criminals and everybody is trying to kill them for it,” it's a failure of storytelling.

Unlike Heart Eyes, which works as a rom-com and a slasher, Love Hurts isn't very adept with the “rom” – two side characters who have the funniest subplot also generate more heat than Quan and DeBose. Part of the problem is that we meet the leads long after Marvin (Quan) spared the life of Rose (DeBose) due to his secret, unrequited crush on her, and then left the hitman life to sell houses instead. He has become a relentlessly cheery, non-sweary kind of glad-hander when Rose, and those chasing her, come back into his life in a most violent way. Along the way, the story separates them plenty, as rom-coms should, but only if we're given enough time initially to see that they're right for each other. Save for one sexy gaze and a bit of inner monologue, we never quite get what she sees in him; as for what he sees in her, it doesn't seem to be much more than any straight guy would see in her. Are there no other beauties in the world who come with less threat of death attached?

Bear in mind, this has a script that finds hilarity in naming the lead “Marvin Gable,” as the movie plays Marvin Gaye on the soundtrack just to make sure you get it.

Director Jonathan Eusebio is a former stuntman, and Quan a former choreographer; making it a trifecta, David Leitch serves as a producer. You'd expect great fight sequences, and you get them – Quan's mild resemblance to Jackie Chan enhances the way he often fights like an underdog improvising weapons with whatever's nearby. His battles are a LOT bloodier overall, but aside from nameless henchman, very few of the major characters receive fatal injuries. This could have been made as PG-13 – it's aggravating when the leads enter a strip club and there's no nudity there – but Eusebio revels in practical blood effects, and bless him for that.

I can't lie: there's something I strongly connect with in seeing a protagonist forced out of his old life making the best of it with a new day job like real estate. And I do appreciate that he is actually good at his new job and likes it, despite having seriously suppressed his skill at the old one. But the movie doesn't do the best job of playing up that tension – I feel Marvin's love of real estate more strongly than any he has for Rose. It might not help that even though Quan retains his spark of childlike innocence we remember from the '80s, his age mismatch with DeBose is some stereotypical May-September Hollywood trope shit.

Speaking of the '80s, though, Quan's old Goonies buddy Sean Astin shows up to steal some scenes, and nicely plays off of our expectations for a character who looks like J.R. Ewing. His big moment with Daniel Wu, who plays Marvin's villainous brother Alvin, is a standout scene, and a rare beat of the stakes suddenly feeling legit deadly rather than slapstick. I found it so engrossing that I didn't even think of the Goonies connection until a pal reminded me after the screening, but it's remarkable how much I enjoy Astin today relative to how boring I used to find him for years.

Love Hurts is only a date movie if you both (or more than both; I'm not judging polycules) like martial-arts action – it is not a “love story for her, action stuff for him” type of deal in any evenhanded way (I'm using “her” and “him” to describe stereotypical personalities here, not genders as such, as I hope is obvious). The movie such people are looking for, again, is Heart Eyes.

Still, there are more dyed-in-the-wool action stars who'd kill to have as many good fights in one movie as Ke Huy Quan does in Love Hurts. If this proves to Disney that a Short Round streaming series can work, may Shiva and Kali bless it.

Love Hurts opens Feb. 7^th in theaters. Images courtesy of Universal.