The writing is more bonkers than the action in Love Hurts, a John Wick-esque vehicle for Ke Huy Quan

The popularity and surprising longevity of the John Wick franchise has had results that nearly everyone could have predicted: countless imitators and a shorthand position in the cultural discourse that has placed nearly every contemporary action movie in the unenviable position of being “John Wick but ‘X’.”

While the aesthetics of the Chad Stahelski-helmed series have made their way into some improbable corners, the list of movies that are actually direct descendants of John Wick is pretty short, and nearly all of them have had involvement from 87North, the stunt-forward production company founded by Stahelski and David Leitch. 

Vengeance coming from an unlikely vengeful spirit is not enough to compare your garden-variety action hero to John Wick. That action hero needs to exist in a complex underworld populated nearly exclusively by a hierarchy of mysteriously named assassins with a tightly codified set of skills. It was certainly true of Bob Odenkirk in Nobody and it’s true of Ke Huy Quan in Love Hurts, the latest 87North production to bring together overly tailored suits, blades hidden in a combat boot and people being flung across neon aquariums built directly into the wall.

Marvin Gable (Quan) is an aw-shucks suburban realtor who wears sweater vests, bikes to work and loves nothing more than to find upwardly mobile young professionals million-dollar homes nestled in a cul-de-sac. On Valentine’s Day, however, he receives a curious Valentine signifying that a woman from his past (Arianna DeBose, continuing her post-Oscar run as a conduit for robotic exposition) has resurfaced; Marvin has little time to deal with the implications of that before he’s assaulted by a duster-wearing bladesman known as The Raven (Mustapha Shakir) and subsequently chased, kicked, punched, stabbed and thrown around in various locales by a coterie of wise-cracking hitmen and goons. Cutesy-poo, asexual Marvin is not, as it turns out, all he seems — he’s a retired assassin, and the world he’s tried to leave behind has found him.

Love Hurts banks first and foremost on the audience’s goodwill towards Quan, whose triumphant return in Everything Everywhere All at Once represented perhaps one of the only purely wholesome comeback stories of recent years. The character of Marvin Gable isn’t far removed from the Quan we all rediscovered on the Oscar campaign trail, but we also learned that in his years away from acting, Quan worked behind the scenes in stunt coordinating, making his presence here less of an anomaly than it appears. Quan seems therefore perfectly suited for this particular role… and that appears to be the entire focus of Love Hurts.

Though it’s bookended by a couple of bravura action sequences, nearly half of Love Hurts’ anemic 83-minute runtime is devoted to endless exposition and world-building doled out haphazardly through every means necessary. Characters have long, static conversations about a backstory barely glimpsed. Voiceover narration then reiterates the same points that were just discussed as the internal monologue of a character, who continues to pontificate on the implications of what was just said. The familiar screenwriting idiom “show, don’t tell” is tased in the balls and hit with a shovel several times over — there’s absolutely nothing in here that’s inferred or suggested. The world depicted by Love Hurts isn’t particularly complex and wrapping our heads around its many implications isn’t particularly necessary to enjoying Quan getting thrown into a refrigerator, and yet it appears to be of critical concern to the filmmakers. 

Endless platitudes about freedom and love and going your own way are thrown about as the viewer patiently waits for someone to get kicked in the face. Though Love Hurts isn’t really about anything in the strictest sense, it seems all too eager to give weight to the proceedings and consequently lean on that weight at every opportunity. The tone proves to be wobbly at best, with earnest declarations of boundless love sandwiching sub-Tarantino bits of black humour where characters are brutally dispatched with a boba straw and tough-guy killers hug it out about their feelings. It’s not inconceivable that an action movie could also have interesting and smart things to say about the nature of love, but it’s rarely a given, and the simplistic, flop-sweat-drenched writing at the heart of Love Hurts ultimately tanks any chance it may have taken on that front.

The action scenes, on the other hand, are as effective as one would expect. Taking advantage of the fact that a realtor has a bunch of empty houses at his disposal, they’re clean and brutal and inventive, with Quan proving to be a compelling (if not exactly Hong Kong-level fearless) martial artist on-screen. He proves to be better served by the portions of the movie that lean into his loveable public persona. Flashbacks of him as the fearless killer of yore are less convincing, as is his ostensible chemistry with DeBose, once again saddled with a thankless role in some junk after the impressively junky one-two punch of Argylle and Kraven the Hunter. There are amusing supporting roles for Marshawn Lynch, Sean Astin and Lio Tipton, but so much of their screentime is spent shading in the unnecessary background that they soon melt into it.

It’s obvious that Love Hurts has fairly reasonable ambitions: it’s designed to give Ke Huy Quan a vehicle as an action hero, a bespoke ass-kicking addition to the resume meant to prevent him from being typecast as a put-upon beta husband in the wake of his Oscar win. With those modest goals in mind, Love Hurts succeeds; in doing nearly anything else that a movie of this type should do, it does not. It’s lumbering and awkward and frequently grinds to a halt to let its ham-fisted screenplay breathe; if its handful of action scenes work, it’s often out of a tremendous amount of goodwill that audiences bring to the movie rather than anything contained in the film itself. ■

Love Hurts opens in Montreal theatres on Friday, Feb. 7.

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