Movie Review: Love Hurts

https://open.spotify.com/episode/4dTiSrB8E7PCnAGiW6bb6C?si=lXdT2BOHQcW2Kc73umKQKw

Like a house, a movie can have "good bones." Maybe the product being sold isn't great on the surface but maybe a pass or two more on the script could have made the final product a little stronger. Love Hurts is not good, and not good to the point where someone should probably see if they can get a new agent for Ariana DeBose, but there could have been a good movie with this cast and premise.

The movie follows a guy who was an organized crime hitman who gets pulled back into the thick of things because he was in love with a target and didn't kill her, so she comes back to expose some of what happened on the accounting side of things in the organization. If that sounds confusing, it's because it is. To make matters worse, some of the themes that come from this aren't quite fleshed out so the movie just kind of meanders through the plot.

No character in the movie has a coherent motivation or arc except maybe the henchman who hangs out with Marshawn Lynch throughout the entire movie. He at least learns to open up emotionally. No one else has an arc worth noting because it is not clear that there was a plan on how to end the movie.

There are things that work in the movie. The visual aesthetic and schtick behind The Raven as an assassin is pretty cool. The idea of this brother vs. brother conflict could have been good if it was better established throughout the movie. The aesthetic of the brother's business makes for an interesting setting for a fight, even if the movie does not do anything with the environment. A few of the fight sequences are also engaging enough, but nothing on the level of say Monkey Man or John Wick.

Arguably, the biggest issues with this movie come from the technical failings. Take the first return of Marvin to the world of organized crime when The Raven shows up at his office, if Marvin's arc is to come out from his brother's shadow (which the ending indicates it is), shouldn't it have been Knuckles who showed up to talk to him, not this random crony? If the point of the movie is that the found new life as a real estate agent is the life he earns, then why does it end with him running off with Rose and visiting her at work while Ash gets her own other ending? Why do we need the internal monologue for both Rose and Marvin to explain to us how they feel? Is it because the movie does such a bad job of laying out their motivations and emotions that we need this spoon-fed?

The runtime of this movie is both a blessing and a curse because it's not good enough where I had any desire to hang around longer than the hour and 25 minutes that it already was, but there is also a world in which this movie takes an extra 15 to 20 minutes to better lay out all the characters and motivations. The structural issues would still be there but you probably wouldn't need a voiceover to explain Marvin thinking that he should take his own advice.

★★★

Love Hurts
Directed by: Jonathan Eusebio
Written by: Matthew Murray, Josh Stoddard, and Luke Passmore
Starring: Ke Huy Quan, Ariana DeBose, Marshawn Lynch, Mustafa Shakir, Daniel Wu, and Lio Tipton
Rating: R
Release Date: February 7th, 2025