Review: Love Hurts (2025)
Can an infusion of sincerity and optimism balance out the sour cynicism of a Tarantinine murder gang?
Love Hurts (2025)
Directed by Jonathan Eusebio
Imagine a post-Tarantino world — happy thought! — in which that very tiresome filmmaker’s oeuvre has been reduced to a few standard elements: kung-fu performed by Americans in shabby urban settings decorated like an incel martial arts fan’s man cave; an Afro-American femme fatale who poses and pouts, but little else; muscled but stylish thugs who alternate murder with comic banter; weirdly quotidian objects (a plastic drink straw, oversized tableware) used as weapons; hot cars presented unironically.
In the middle of this meme-fest comes a chipper, very sincere real estate agent named Marvin (Ke Huy Quan) who loves his job because he used to be an assassin in the Tarantinine milieu and his boss Chet gave him a chance at a new life away from it. When worlds collide (it is a movie), Marvin has to face his past and make a choice and redemption true love something something.
Quan is, of course, the sunny fellow who appeared as a boy in an Indiana Jones movie and then in “The Goonies,” got almost no work for three decades, then finally re-emerged, as if from a chrysalis, as the surprising, heroic figure in “Everything Everywhere All at Once.” In the latter film, he was pathetic, then heroic; and then, to really confuse viewers, debonaire. When he won the Best Supporting Actor award, he was impossibly charming, optimistic and sincere. Instead of being bitter about his decades-long drought, he acted grateful just to have gotten another chance and faith-in-oneself redemption something.
In “Love Hurts,” Quan embodies this insanely positive persona in a fictional character. Like almost everything else in the picture, and unlike on Oscar night, it comes off with some irony, yet while I was watching the movie, I was willing to let myself be convinced that Quan’s character Marvin really had once been not only an assassin, but an extremely brutal, unhinged one. And that a gentle Stetson-wearing man named Chet — played by Sean Astin, who appeared alongside Quan in “The Goonies” — had turned Marvin’s life around by giving him the chance to be someone who finds real fulfillment in helping people find a home. We see several pairs of Marvin's clients -- they’re always couples –- as he tells them about how he felt when he got his first home, and how that motivates him to help them find theirs. And even though we understand that he tells the same story to every single client, there's something sweet, not cynical, about it. I guess that's a tribute to both how the character was written and to Quan's embrace of him – though Marvin is so similar to the person Quan showed himself to be when he accepted his Oscar that I've no doubt that the character must have been written for him.
Former associates of Marvin from his gangsta days start showing up. They’re on the trail of a former associate, Rose, whom Marvin was supposed to kill for stealing the boss's money. One of the thugs is a sinister, hulking dude known only as the Raven (Mustafa Shakir). The only time that the Raven is not monosyllabic is when he's reciting his own overly sincere poetry, contained in a large notebook that he carries around. After what is only the first knockdown dragout fight in this movie, which ends with Marvin knocking the Raven unconscious in his office and fleeing, Marvin's assistant Ashley (Lio Tipton) discovers the unconscious, monstrous-appearing thug, then notices the notebook on the floor next to him. She begins reading it out loud and is thunderstruck. Though to the viewer and everyone else in the movie, except for Ashley and the Raven, his poetry sounds silly, Tipton1 does a hilarious job of making clear Ashley finds it the most profound thing ever.
Her recitation wakes the unconscious Raven, who sits up, and instead of killing her, says (paraphrasing here) “No one’s ever got my poetry before.” She replies in equally awed tones, “I've never read anything that got me before.” Cupid's arrow strikes! Did I mention that the entire story is set on Valentine's Day?
This development sets up a change of alliance, if not heart: The Raven still has orders to capture Marvin and, if necessary, beat out of him information that will lead the gang to Rose. But now that Marvin's assistant can get through to the thug in a way no one else can, for the first time in the movie we're not sure what's going to happen. And that's a real relief, because everything was pretty much by the numbers until now.
Just by spending this much space explaining the plot of the movie takes the movie way more seriously than it should be taken. Really, it's just an exercise in juxtaposing the overly sweet and sincere character that Marvin/Quan himself embodies against a cynical Tarantinine set of characters and plot. And there are probably a million in-jokes about kung fu movies that go completely past me; If you're a fan, you'll probably really enjoy the movie just for these references (which I'm only assuming exist). Marshawn Lynch, an NFL star turned actor, also plays a heavy employed by the same gang, a somewhat more obviously comic turn. And he’s good too.
But I do have to say: Ariana DeBose,2 who plays the character of Rose, is terrible in this movie from start to finish. And I don't think that aspect of the film was supposed to be camp. She's just terrible.
I previously saw Tipton as a college girl with Greta Gerwig in “Damsels in Distress” (2011). It’s a very weird movie, but Tipton stands out, and there’s an Aubrey Plaza cameo as well.