By Mark Fields
Retired Assassin Reluctantly Revisits Old Life
Ke Huy Quan, the endearingly earnest child star of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom and The Goonies, had a remarkably gratifying career rebirth with his Oscar-winning performance in Everything Everywhere All At Once. But even in that film, his aw-shucks persona remained largely untouched. In Love Hurts, a film that is a clear bid to expand that persona, Quan plays Marvin Gable, a retired criminal bad-ass trying to make a new, less eventful life as a Milwaukee realtor. Although Quan is a credible marital artist and brawler, the rest of the film is as messy as the fight scene aftermath.
The realtor Marvin is a funny play on the actor’s earnest reputation. He rides a bike to work, makes cookies for open houses, and his own home is tidy to the point of unbelievable. His tame daily existence is thrown, quickly, into chaos by the unexpected return of his former love interest, Rose (Ariana DeBose), a lawyer whom Marv was supposed to kill at the orders of his gangster brother, Knuckles (Daniel Wu). Knuckles sends all manner of thug to find Rose via Marvin, because she knows all his dirty secrets. But the plot is the most flimsy of excuses for a progression of set-piece fight scenes pitting the diminutive Quan against these assailants (who are mostly tired caricatures).
There are moments of wit in the fights, though they are mostly thrown away. There are also some amusing bits of character interplay, such as Marvin’s realty assistant becoming smitten with a poetry-writing killer called the Raven. But any nanoseconds of entertainment are swept away in the unimaginative torrent of punches and throws, accented with plenty of gratuitous gore. Candidly, I find the current trend of turning vivid violence into slapstick humor more than a little disturbing…and decidedly unfunny.
One final note: Love Hurts is an interesting entry into the slate of these violent comedies because its principal cast is mostly people of color. Sad that their talents are wasted on such a horrible film.
