"Love Hurts" Review

 Is there a rule that once you win an Oscar your next career move should be to make a silly action movie? After Angelina Jolie won, she made Lara Croft: Tomb Raider, launching her into a solid action flick career in between her serious gigs, and after Alicia Vikander won, she also made the third Tomb Raider movie.

So it wasn't a huge surprise when the trailer dropped for Love Hurts which stars Cinderella story hero Ke Huy Quan, fresh off his career-resurrecting win for Everything Everywhere All At Once, and Ariana DeBose, the actress from West Side Story who didn't go on to lose Disney hundreds of millions of dollars with her dumb mouth. Serious Actors getting paid and having fun? What could go wrong? Turns out plenty.

Quan is Marvin Gable, a successful Milwaukee real estate agent with a dark secret past (shades of Nobody) whose new life is upended by the arrival back in town of Rose (DeBose), a woman he was supposed to kill because she stole from the crime organization headed by his brother Knuckles (Daniel Wu, Into the Badlands).

Marvin has no idea why she's back, but Knuckles sends a bunch of colorfully quirky hitmen after Marvin to find out including a hulking wannabe poet, Raven (Mustafa Shakir, the live action Cowboy Bebop); Otis (André Eriksen, Vikings), a guy trying to save his troubled marriage and his sidekick, King (pro football player Marshawn "Beastmode" Lynch), because everyone loved the guys in Bullet Train blathering about Thomas the Tank Engine characters. Meanwhile, Knuckles right hand man, Renny (Cam Gigandet, Burlesque), needs to find Rose for his own reasons related to why she why she was marked for deletion years before.

 There is so much quirkiness crammed into the brief 83-minute runtime that anything resembling a coherent plot gets jettisoned. Marvin has a depressed assistant, Ashley (Lio Tipton, formerly Analeigh - Crazy Stupid Love - who is now "queer and non-binary" but married to a man because "bisexual" is what old people were or something), who instantly falls in love with Raven, so we keep cutting back to those two. Same with Otis and King; who needs to understand Marvin and Rose when Otis needs to be seen beating up someone for a teddy bear to give his wife? Can't forget Knuckles and his love of boba tea either!

While all that superfluous drivel gets plenty of time, we never see why Marvin and Rose were in love. Frankly, it seems more like he was secretly pining for her, but the trio of inconsequential writers of no note focused on everything but the leads. Rose is barely a two-dimensional character, so we have no idea why Marvin swooned and defied his brother's kill order.

Compounding the derivative and thin script is the tone deaf direction by rookie helmer Jonathan Eusebio, a veteran stuntman with association with 87North Productions and who, like company co-founder David Leitch (Bullet Train, The Fall Guy, Deadpool 2), cannot balance tone and action to save his life. The action sequences are impressive and Quan does well in continuing Jackie Chan's signature style of using the environment's props in the fights, but they also get too brutal for a comedic film. The comic hijinks war with some dark undercurrents and in refusing to pick a lane, it rides the center line into oncoming traffic.

Sadly lost in the noise is Quan's performance where he somehow manages to imbue Marvin with waaaaaay more depth than the script provides, even making his return to being Knuckles' "monster" believable when he started as a goofy guy. (Quan's high-pitched accent is a problem for playing heavy drama at times.) During his hiatus from acting, he worked as a fight coordinator for the first X-Men movie as well as on Jet Li's The One, so I guess we shouldn't be surprised he has some fight moves.

Instead of watching this disappointing mess, I strongly recommend you seek out The Big Hit, starring Marky Mark as a hitman tasked with babysitting a young woman whose kidnapping he participated in. Everything Love Hurts does wrong with subplots and side characters works fabulously here and the chemistry between Marky and China Chow exists where DeBose just shows up and we're supposed to believe it. Seriously, watch The Big Hit. You're welcome.

Score: 4/10. Skip it.