Locally-shot action flick full of fight, short on story

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 07/02/2025 (611 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

If you saw Ke Huy Quan’s Academy Award-winning work in Everything Everywhere All at Once, you probably thought: This guy deserves his own movie.

And Quan does. But maybe a better movie than this just-OK, Winnipeg-shot action comedy, which features standup, stand-out fight scenes but not much to connect them.

Love Hurts draws on Quan’s long experience as a stunt choreographer, but there isn’t much scope for the acting work that snagged him an Oscar.

Quan plays Marvin Gable, a cheerful, soft-spoken Wisconsin real-estate agent. (Our town is standing in for Milwaukee, alternating between deliberately bland suburbia and a downright glamorous downtown.)

Marvin is the kind of guy who says “good morning” to his garden gnome and encourages his depressive gen-Z co-worker (Lio Tipton) with uplifting motivational phrases.

The only form of martial arts he practises involves doing that “karate chop” thing with the throw pillows in his pristine, ecru-coloured show home.

Marvin is happy selling ugly houses until one fateful Valentine’s Day, when he finds himself reluctantly drawn back into the criminal underworld he thought he’d safely left behind. Former fixer Rose Carlisle (actor and musician Ariana DeBose, another Oscar winner for West Side Story) is supposed to be dead and her sudden reappearance has Marvin’s crime-lord brother, Knuckles Gable (Daniel Wu), all riled up.

This basic plot — a seemingly mild man forced to unleash the pent-up violence of his past — calls up the Bob Odenkirk hit Nobody (also shot in Winnipeg), but Love Hurts never finds that film’s tonal sweet spot between ultra-violent and weirdly delightful.

Scripters Matthew Murray, Josh Stoddard and Luke Passmore struggle to find a vibe, caroming between fun, consequence-free mayhem and grim collateral damage, and their pacing is off.

Clocking in at a compact 83 minutes, Love Hurts is brisk. While it’s understandable that director Jonathan Eusebio, a veteran stunt co-ordinator and fight choreographer who’s worked on The Fall Guy and the John Wick franchise, wants to get to the action, the martial arts sequences would actually pack more punch if they had more set-up.

Still, if the film’s connective tissue is flimsy and frequently derivative, the fight scenes are precise, inventive and often funny, especially when the combatants start using office supplies or kitchenware as weapons.

There’s a comic brawl in which Marvin, who genuinely loves his life as a realtor, fends off two murderous heavies, all while trying to protect the framed award he’s just received for being regional salesperson of the year.

Setting several donnybrooks at Marvin’s staged suburban show home is also an inspired move. Once you see the kitchen island and the sliding barn doors and the word art, you know it’s going to get trashed, and it’s oddly satisfying to watch all that sterile perfection come undone.

The supporting cast is quirky, in a calculated, Tarantino-lite sort of way. Former NFLer Marshawn Lynch and André Erickson play King and Otis, henchmen who are hunting down Marvin while trying to talk through Otis’s problems with “emotional unavailability.” There’s a hired assassin called the Raven (Mustafa Shakir), whose shtick is writing gloomy poetry between kills. There are pop-ins from Rhys Darby and Quan’s Goonies co-star Sean Astin. Property Brother Drew Scott makes a real estate-themed appearance.

Local actors Stephanie Sy (recent star of Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre’s Waitress) and Adam Hurtig get some brief but memorable screentime as perky would-be homebuyers.

Unfortunately, even the starring roles have shorthand gimmicks in place of character development. (We know Knuckles is a bad guy, for example, because he has a really sinister way of drinking boba tea.)

At the beginning of the film, Rose sends Marvin a valentine that opens to the phrase “Hiding isn’t living.” The notion that Marvin needs to face his past and once again embrace his whole self is supposed to supply his emotional motivation, but this remains a slogan rather than a storyline.

As innately likable as Quan is, his character really only comes alive when he’s kicking bad guys in the throat.

alison.gillmor@freepress.mb.ca