The dreary, derivative and punchless action comedy “Love Hurts” is proof that a movie can have an 83-minute running time and still seem like a slow-motion slog. Even with the presence of recent Oscar winners Ke Huy Quan (“Everything Everywhere All at Once”) and Ariana DeBose (“West Side Story”) as co-leads, this is a remarkably tone-deaf, unfunny, cynical and clunky piece of work that manages to defy all feeling that it could exist in the real world, even for an escapist live-action cartoon.
It’s as if they took various ingredients from the Quentin Tarantino catalog, mixed in a medley of fights from the “Bourne” franchise (only without any real sense of menace), sprinkled in some lame attempts at dark humor, tossed ‘em into a malfunctioning AI Blender and hit “Puree.”
With the lid off.
It’s been, what, a whole three weeks since Jamie Foxx and Cameron Diaz played former lethal operatives who go off the grid and establish a quiet, suburban life only to learn you can’t run from your past, so here we go again. Ke Huy Quan plays Marvin Gable, a mild-mannered Realtor in suburban Milwaukee who is the kind of guy who rides his bicycle to work every day, waving to everyone as if he’s in a 1950s musical, and bakes pink, heart-shaped cookies to hand out on Valentine’s Day. (The movie was shot in Winnipeg, Manitoba, but the visuals are so generic and bland that it’s almost as if we’re in the manufactured town from “The Truman Show,” only with lots of knives and guns.)
Life is peachy and predictable and normal, which is just the way Marvin likes it — until a poetry-spouting hit man known as The Raven (Mustafa Shakier), who has enough sharp weapons on his person to fully equip an upscale kitchen on “The Bear,” slips into Marvin’s office, jabs a knife through his hand and knocks him out. Once Marvin comes to, he engages in a knock-down drag-out, stunt-heavy brawl with The Raven, even as his company’s Valentine’s Day party is in full force on the other side of the door. (Marvin’s ennui-filled associate Ashley, played by Leo Tipton, knocks on the door and inquires if everything is OK, and blithely accepts Marvin’s explanation that he’s doing a high-intensity yoga workout.)
Ah, but The Raven isn’t the only one on the hunt. A couple of wisecracking, dim-bulb hit men named King and Otis (played by Marshawn “Beastmode” Lynch and André Eriksen) are also after Marvin — cue another stylized, quick-cut, seemingly endless fight sequence that feels choreographed every inch of the way — as is Cam Gigandet’s slimy and corrupt Renny Merlo, who works for … none other than Marvin’s crime-boss brother, “Knuckles” (Daniel Wu).
All of this chaos comes courtesy of Ariana DeBose’s Rose, who was left for dead many years ago but has resurfaced, seeing her revenge. Or a love connection with Marvin. Or a chance to wear a leopard coat and beat everybody up. (Everybody who is looking for Marvin is hoping he’ll lead them to Rose. Because of skimming profits and missing millions and nobody steals from Knuckles, man!)
“Love Hurts” is rife with inexplicable elements. Marvin has left behind his previous life as a ruthless assassin and is supposedly off the grid, but he’s a high-profile Realtor whose face is plastered all over billboards and benches. We’re told Rose has just resurfaced, but she’s already working as a bartender at a strip club that seems to be within driving distance of Marvin’s house, while Knuckles’ headquarters also appear to be somewhere in Fake Milwaukee. (The editing is so choppy that at times it’s difficult to discern simple things like distances between locales.)
Director Jonathan Eusebio is an actor and assistant director who has worked on films such as “300,” “Black Panther” and “The Fall Guy,” but there’s no sense here of any true vision or original approach. (By the time we get to the obligatory needle drop of a 1970s pop classic to accompany an extended fight sequence, the cause has long been lost.) Time and again, this film takes strange detours, whether it’s an interrogation scene between Knuckles and Marvin’s boss (Quan’s fellow “Goonies” alum Sean Astin) that plays like a variation on the Christopher Walken/Dennis Hopper sequence in “True Romance,” or a bizarre love connection between Ashley and The Raven, because his poetry speaks to her.
If you think love hurts, try sitting through this without seriously considering a dash for the exits. Talk about painful.