In his first live-action film appearance since winning an Oscar for Everything Everywhere All at Once, comeback kid Ke Huy Quan has chosen a movie that recycles the earlier one’s hit formula. Martial arts action plays out incongruously in quotidian locations; life lessons are combined with close-quarter combat. One difference is Love Hurts’s gloating reliance on gore: a hand is impaled with a knife, a pen is buried in a man’s eyeball, teeth stick to the duct tape ripped from a hostage’s mouth. It all rather puts the “ick” in karate kick.
Quan plays Marvin Gable, a realtor whose chirpiness conceals his past as a hitman for his crime-boss brother Knuckles (Daniel Wu). For his last job before going straight, Marvin was asked to kill Rose (Ariana DeBose), his one-time sweetheart who stole millions from the mob. But he took mercy, and now she’s back. Tired of lying low (“Hiding ain’t living,” she says), Rose is out to take revenge on those who wronged her, among them a snivelling accountant played by Rhys Darby of Flight of the Conchords, and to rekindle affections with her old flame. Well, it’s Valentine’s Day after all, as Marvin’s voiceover keeps reminding us.
