A realtor is pulled back into the life he left behind after his former partner-in-crime resurfaces with an ominous message. With his crime-lord brother also on his trail, he must confront his past...
Love extends far beyond a person, a place, an ideal or beliefs within yourself and others; the universality of that feeling as much as it inspires you to be greater, the inverse of that pursuit, depending on who you are, can also be destined to lead to calamity. That love was clearly misplaced for “Love Hurts”, turning Ke Huy Quans first leading man vehicle into….
….just another basic action flick.
I somehow both pity and am sad for Jonathan Eusebio; his first time directing a full length feature film more or less crashes under the crushing weight of being overbooked. When he’s not emulating the golden era of Hong Kong action comedies, he’s telling more than he’s showing and that gives forth to a direction under lots of distress on the who’s, what’s and how’s.
As overly symbolic as the overall production design’s aesthetic and construction presents itself as, the one thing it can’t escape is how sterile they feel. Nothing is wrong with the sets carrying predictable, visual cues of thematic dissection and character alignments but the Valentine’s Day seasonal setting is a very loose attachment that adds little to the predictable sequence of events and often feels at odds with the already janky tone, scope and scale. Presentation-wise, it’s basically window-dressing with a plastic wrapping.
Honestly, that’s the story behind this entire debacle: there are decent things to remember about it, but the sheer amount of disorganization massively trumps the good. Like, the cinematography shows many signs of graceful composition but the editing barely carries over any poise or sense of momentum. It’s only mildly funny when it’s not trying to be, the pacing jauntily bounces from loiteringly lagging to a sudden burst of alacrity at the most uneven of tempos, Dominic Lewis’s score is more atmospheric than the actual atmosphere, and with a runtime both too short to register yet overstretched beyond its primary function, literally everything that isn’t strictly focused on action has to be stripped down to the bone for the sake of time constraints and nothing else. Hell, the action sequences are the only genuinely satisfying portions of this experience thanks to old school stunts and intricate fight choreography, and even those get weighed down due to the haphazard staging and how repetitive the fights gradually evolve into.
That being said, the incompatible tone does hold the film together with the tiniest bit of unironic charm and campiness due to how messy it is and takes it far down that trail just enough to where you’d get a few chuckles out of it.
I really don’t want to pick on the acting here since everyone knows the roles they have to play and do it exceptionally well. It is so very nice to see Ke Huy Quan finally in a leading role in a Hollywood flick and for his first time given top billing, he handles the pressure exponentially well; just a shame the character he’s stuck with is aggressively one-note and two dimensional. Honestly, I feel that with all the characters involved and the chemistry between them really does flounder with stupid dialogue and befuddling ADR on top of that.
What the trailer sells you on, the story more or less gives you exactly that: ordinary law-abiding guy with a particular set of skills gets roped back out of retirement one last time to clean up loose ends from his past (with falling in love as a bonus). As a shoddy conglomeration of ’70’s exploitation flicks and cheesy ‘90’s rom-coms, it’s easy to imagine running into the typical laundry list of cliches while turning your brain off to enjoy the ride (and to its credit, it scarcely achieved that feat) but its problems boil down to what it wants to be and what it’s selling being worlds apart. The hunger it feels to overstimulate you to compensate for how little it actually has to offer is pretty large; at best, everything’s grossly underdeveloped and at worst, the sheer deluge of absurdity it throws your way is an obvious symptom of the film spinning its wheels and padding itself to oblivion.
I can give it props for knowing when to wrap things up without overstaying its welcome but given how limp and lazy the storytelling reveals itself as with absent stakes, an unconvincing romance and plot-holes about the size of the abandoned Pennsylvania Turnpike tunnels, 83 plus minutes feels like a mercy killing. And since the film structure is condensed to such a belligerent extreme, they have to add in narration to fill in the scenes that might not have registered because everything brushes by with little to no vital clarity and all of it feels weightless by the time we wrap everything up. Even its themes of redemption and balancing out the unsavory parts of you with the good don’t hold much value.
Yeah, I’ve watched a lot of time-waster movies over the years but structurally speaking, this is one of the more blatant examples of that. Doesn’t matter that it’s essentially a live-action cartoon and it doesn’t take itself so seriously.
Look, objectively speaking, I know deep down in my heart I shouldn’t rank the movie this high since it half-asses everything it tries to attempt to appease the feature length structure. But that’s the thing: you can accept that a movie is patchy and rough in almost every conceivable fashion and still be hoot to laugh at; this is one such case.
