Knock on Wood

Sometimes, a movie looks perfect on paper. It has a great cast, a great creative team, a perfect runtime…but the final product just can’t live up to its promises. It happens more often than one might think, especially since most of these are low-budget genre pictures that are only made because of the marginal involvement of one or two big names. Sometimes, though, these films defy the odds and become something truly special, either upon their immediate release or through re-evaluation years later.

Somewhere in the middle is Love Hurts, a movie that has everything going for it. At its center is Ke Huy Quan in his first-ever leading role following the blockbuster awards sweep of his supporting performance in Everything Everywhere All At Once, and it couldn’t be more deserved. A martial arts-focused role is exactly where he would excel, and so a film like this is the natural next step. Not to mention, this film co-stars Ariana DeBose (an Oscar winner herself, for Spielberg’s West Side Story), Sean Astin (Quan’s Goonies co-star), Rhys Darby (Our Flag Means Death), and Daniel Wu (an internationally well-known Hong Kong actor and filmmaker). It’s also the very first film directed by stuntman Jonathan Eusebio, and is produced by action-oriented production company 87North.

And yet, Love Hurts just isn’t getting the credit I had hoped it would. Maybe it’s an effect of the negative buzz, but I was very pleasantly surprised by this movie. It has a unique earnestness to it, and a confidence that can be off-putting to those not expecting an unapologetically silly movie. Quan stars as Marvin Gable, a successful real estate agent who is pulled back into a world he thought he left behind when an old friend, Rose (DeBose), returns to town. Together, they must avoid a parade of hitmen while confronting their own shared past.

It’s hard to interpret exactly which angle the screenplay is using as an entry point – not only is the dialogue unbearably cheesy, but it’s riddled with clichés, and occasional narration verbalizes character beats that are subtextually implied and do not need to be said out loud. I only realized midway through that this movie is not nakedly bad in the slightest – it’s a sendup, perhaps even a loving parody, of classic Hong Kong action movies that are driven by their action and bask in the ham of their ridiculousness. Love Hurts is so confident in this endeavor that it can come off as indulgent when it’s really meant to be just plain fun. I found the film to be a whole lot more entertaining after realizing exactly what it’s trying to do.

This is not to say that the film is not a mess. It is – and that’s part of its charm. Set pieces are repeated over and over again (albeit with increasingly impressive fight choreography and escalating stakes, both for the action and the humor), line deliveries are janky more often than not, and the whole narrative is somewhat circular, but that didn’t particularly faze me. It’s an action showcase, and a breezy one, too – the whole affair clocks in at just over 80 minutes, and that’s with a revolving door of incredibly endearing side stories, all revolving around the inherent Valentine’s Day theme. Love Hurts is one of those holiday movies only tangentially related to said holiday, but with enough thematic parallels to justify the association. It’s destined to be a cult classic, and just like last year’s Argylle for our contributor Davis Mathis, we have the receipts. We were here first. Love Hurts is an absolute blast.

Love Hurts is playing in theaters nationwide…but for how much longer? See it now, while you can!