Love Hurts review (2025) – action rom com needs no love
Love Hurts tries and miserably fails trying to have it both ways. In fairness, few filmmakers have tried to blend a slapstick action comedy with a needlessly gratuitously bloody flick. Love Hurts shouldn’t convince any aspiring filmmakers there’s a market for this thankfully underserved genre.
Based on the premise, Love Hurts actually could have worked. That’s what makes its execution so unfortunate.
The incredibly likable Ke Huy Quan (Everything Everywhere All At Once) stars as Marvin Gable, an overly friendly and positive realtor whose slogan is “I Want a Home For You.” It’s Marvin who tries to provide some happiness to his bleakly depressed administrative assistant (Lio Tipton, Crazy, Stupid, Love.) and provides homemade cookies for the office staff on Valentine’s Day.
Marvin’s hard work has paid off as his boss Cliff (Sean Astin in a supporting role for a little Goonies reunion) awards him the Realtor of the Year award. Everything is going great for Marvin until he gets a Valentine’s Day card from Rose (Ariana DeBose, West Side Story), the woman he was supposed to kill?
Prior to selling homes Marvin was vacating them as the hitman assassin extraordinaire for his brother, Knuckles (Daniel Wu). After his underboss (Cam Gigandet) informed him of Rose’s betrayal, Knuckles ordered Marvin to kill her. As a reward for this job, Knuckles agreed to let Marvin have his own life where he could dish out shortbread cookies instead of cold steel.
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Now that everyone knows Rose is still very much alive, Knuckles wants answers. He sends The Raven (Mustafa Shakir, Luke Cage), a blade-tossing assassin with a knack for bad poetry, to get her location from Marvin.
Love Hurts director Jonathan Eusebio, making his feature film debut, shows the potential fun in the concept of the realtor trying to keep his past and present lives far apart. Marvin battles The Raven in his office while trying to keep the noise down before the staff Valentine’s Day party.
There’s some fun in this mix as Shakir is a towering 6’2″ to Quan’s 5’5″ while Eusebio also leans into the idea that Marvin is out of practice and barely staying alive against a still-active assassin.
Screenwriters Matthew Murray, Josh Stoddard and Luke Passmore get too cute with the arrival of new Knuckles’ henchmen King (Marshawn “Beastmode” Lynch) and Otis (André Eriksen), who they tend to write like a modern-day Jules and Vincent from Pulp Fiction. Only with a fraction of the witty dialogue. After escaping The Raven, Marvin has to deal with King and Otis in a more Jackie Chan-inspired slapstick fight sequence.
Eusebio misses the point of those comedic Chan exploits as they wouldn’t be nearly effective if Chan’s characters were gushing blood and getting brutally beaten down. Quan is already small enough to elicit plenty of audience sympathy getting beat down in a blood-less fashion. The blood gets to a point where it’s just gory for the sake of it. One scene features a hole in someone’s head after a bullet goes through it.
If Eusebio wanted to go the excessive violence path, the script incorporating plenty of internal monologues from Marvin and Rose, doesn’t do him any favors. The tonal shifts from one moment in a scene is jarring going from supposedly funny sight gags to gruesome death scenes. There are a few uncomfortable murder scenes due to the characters really not warranting their fate and because it comes off mean-spirited.
Quan and DeBose manage to keep the blood and guts off of them to shine. The 2023 and 2022 Oscar winning Best Supporting Actor and Actress are fully dialed in for their characters. DeBose does a mean slightly wild assassin and Quan has an innate charisma that makes it easy to root for his character.
Maybe the most impressive aspect of Love Hurts is that Quan did his fight stunts. There’s no camera trickery here — Quan is actually throwing those punches and kicks. Shakir and Wu are solid complementary players while Tipton and Lynch’s performances would be better received if Love Hurts leaned heavier on comedy and quirky characters.
Eusebio puts together some dynamic fight scenes with clever use of background elements to give the action a genuine unpredictable feel. His talents might be better devoted to action carnage efforts like The Raid.
Love Hurts sure seems like a better action comedy trapped in a needlessly gore fest that doesn’t play to its cast’s strengths.
Rating: 3 out of 10
You can get Love Hurts on Blu-Ray now on Amazon.
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