Love Hurts (2025) – Painful

Released: 6th February
Seen: 31st May

It’s always kind of fascinating to see what film an Oscar winner chooses as their big follow up, the movie they put themselves front and centre for that can basically be advertised with the phrase “Starring Oscar Winner”. Sometimes it can be an important personal work of art that the actor managed to finally get produced because they have an Oscar to their name, sometimes it’s a fun romp that shows they have a wide range outside of the film that got them the award in the first place… sadly, often times, the big follow up to an Oscar-winning performance is a massive dud that feels like it’s wasting it’s big star. Love Hurts does something really impressive in that it feels like it’s wasting two Oscar winners and that’s the only impressive thing it does for its entire runtime.

Love Hurts introduces us to the lovable real estate agent Marvin Gable (Ke Huy Quan), a man who almost seems like he’s made entirely out of fluff and kindness who loves his job selling houses to people and doing only that one thing because that’s the only thing he ever does. One day, however, Marvin receives a letter from a woman from his past named Rose (Ariana Debose) followed by a meeting with a knife-wielding assassin/poet named Raven (Mustafa Shakir) who wants to fight/kill Marvin to figure out where Rose is (Because the best way to get information out of someone is to murder them) but surprise, Marvin actually used to be an assassin himself and kicks Raven’s ass, gets reunited with Rose and must team up with her to fight off his old boss, Alvin (Daniel Wu) before Alvin kills them both to keep the secrets of his money laundering scheme quiet… There are other characters and bland subplots but none of it matters, it’s just so dull.

Love Hurts relies almost entirely on the charm offensive of Ke Huy Quan, which I don’t really blame it for trying to do. Ke Huy Quan had arguably one of the best awards seasons anyone has had in the last 10 years when he basically dominated the Supporting actor category for his role in Everything, Everywhere, All At Once. He is a genuinely charming man, it’s a delight seeing him on the screen again and the film knows that better than anyone because it doesn’t have anything else to work with other than his charm, and after a while even that stops working because you soon realise that Ke Huy Quan is not the right kind of person for this film. He’s a fantastic actor, charming and funny and his martial arts skills are absolutely great but he is not matching with everyone else in the film. He’s almost too sweet for this film, the film keeps going for something edgy and then we cut to Ke Huy Quan’s sweet charming face and it just doesn’t work. He says fudge when everyone else says fuck, it’s such a shift that you just don’t want him to be among these people who might be a bad influence on him. 

It’s also not helping that Love Hurts itself just doesn’t seem to know what the hell it’s doing tone wise. It might be a Quentin Tarantino style film with the fast paced witty dialogue and hyper-violence, or it could lean more on the Coen Brothers, at one point it steals the lighting from John Wick and Atomic Blonde but then it uses the comic timing from things like Violent Night. It can’t pick a tone to work with and it can’t pull off any of the tones it’s trying to play with well enough to justify trying them. To pick one example, there’s an entire fight sequence in a brightly coloured room between our main characters and a bunch of goons and the song “My First, My Last, My Everything” by Barry White plays for the entire thing. There’s no link between the song and the scene other than it’s a romantic song in a romcom, the music and the fight aren’t timed together or inform one another, the fight itself isn’t even that good and after a while you kind of wonder why this is happening, except that other action films have set fights to weird song choices so Love Hurts feels like it has to do that to. Most of the time, the reasoning for something looking a certain way is just “Other films did this, so we should do it as well”, but it’s not done well.

The attempt at stylism is certainly interesting, but it never works. Love Hurts never quite goes far enough to feel like an active choice that someone made; it’s just a thing that the filmmakers are going to try but can never really commit to. Heck that’s also just a problem with the script, it has moments that try to be dark and messed up in a fun Tarantino way but they never quite get all the way there, so they try to go for slapstick instead but the timing is just off so then the film might go for something subtle but messes that up too. It’s almost impressive how many things you can see the film trying to do but it never quite works like they clearly wanted it to.

This also kind of reflects in the performances and honestly, even though a lot of the people in Love Hurts are people who I enjoy, they aren’t bringing it here. Ariana Debose is another talented individual who should have her pick of projects, but once again, she’s chosen a dud project, and this one yields nothing. Smaller roles for Sean Astin or Rhys Darby feel like they did some favours on their lunch break because they are barely even trying. The only person in the entire film who actually gives a performance with the right kind of energy is the cameo by Drew Scott AKA one of the fucking Property Brothers. Sure, his role is short, badly written and poorly worked into the main narrative but at least he gets that this is a stupid film and behaves accordingly. 

Look, I know I’m being a bit harsh but Love Hurts doesn’t really do enough to earn much kindness. I get it’s the director’s first time making a film, hopefully it was a good learning experience and his next one will be better but every choice here just feels like the wrong one. A rom-com action film should have, at bare minimum, some romance, some comedy and some good action. If we’re being generous there’s some OK action scenes, the comedy is pretty much non-existent and the two main romances just don’t work because one is between an assassin and an assistant who know each other for about 20 minutes before throwing around the word “Love” while the other is between our two leads who have a 20 year age gap that isn’t being well hidden by anyone. None of the core elements work, around the halfway point it feels like they even stop trying because they just want to get this over with. I get that feeling, believe me I do, but it’s still pretty depressing.

Love Hurts hurts. It hurts because the concept is one that should offer a fun time but it ends up offering boredom. It hurts because the lead actors are so talented and charming that they should be given material that matches their talent and they aren’t getting that. It hurts because you can see where a fun film could exist here, where a few more script rewrites and a little bit of extra time could make for something enjoyable. It hurts because I expected something mindless and fun, but it just gave me a whole heap of nothing, which is the worst Valentine’s gift that they could’ve given me.