Love Hurts (2025)

Watching hurts

It is not fun to pick on Ke Huy Quan. It is also not fun to watch Love Hurts.

In all of his performances and interviews, Quan registers as a rare, pure soul in Hollywood, authentic and kind and persistent. His thick accent (possibly exacerbated by a speech impediment; Internet sleuths are undecided) and his relentless cheerfulness sometimes make him come across as spacey, but he has genuine talent and charm. Whether he’s Short Round or Wayland, you’re rooting for him. Many viewers, myself included, spilled happy tears during his Oscar acceptance speech two years ago. He is one of cinema’s great comeback stories.

Quan has really padded his IMDb page since his Academy Award, and I’m happy that he’s getting more opportunities. On paper, Love Hurts sounds like the exact pitch you’d come up with if you designed a Ke Huy Quan starring vehicle: An action-comedy that lets him show off his stunt acumen (during the long gaps in his acting career, Quan was a stunt coordinator) and casts him as a wholesome everyman. With action gurus 87North responsible for production, it’s easy to imagine a live-wire, action-heavy fun time.

And then you watch the movie. I’m going to be cynical for a moment. I think Universal cast Ke Huy Quan was in this film because he looks a lot like Jackie Chan. Recently, I praised Paul Feig for keeping the “Jackie Chan action-comedy tentpole” alive with Jackpot. But I actually think some executive saw a picture of Quan in Variety, squinted and tilted his head to the side, and announced “a man of Asian descent with a background in stunts; he’ll look like Jackie Chan on the poster; get the John Wick guys on the phone.”

The whole film has that same thrown together feeling, where each idea is one you might jot on a napkin at lunch and never develop beyond that. Not all of Love Hurts is strictly bad in execution: The action scenes are often quite good. I particularly enjoyed a couple of early fights — an office invasion and a scuffle in a home kitchen involving a microwave and refrigerator. Or maybe I just liked the early action because I hadn’t completely checked out on the film.

A couple other ideas stick: Former football star and rising comedy actor Marshawn Lynch plays a knockoff version of Samuel L. Jackson in Pulp Fiction named King. The trio of writers apparently conceived King off the proposition that it is inherently funny to watch Lynch say “fuck” a bunch of time. This assumption turns out to be correct. Speaking of football-adjacent stars, Sean Astin, Rudy himself, appears as a sympathetic coworker and mentor to Quan’s protagonist Marvin. It occurred to me as I watched that I haven’t seen Astin in anything in a while, but his IMDb shows that he’s extremely busy in low-budget genre fare these days, little of which interests me. Good for him to keep getting those paychecks. Astin is famously affable and generous. Here, he strikes just the right tone and presence as a cowboy hat-donning southern gentleman.

And then there’s Quan himself. To his credit, he is giving the role his all. He wants to seize his moment, starring in a film with a budget and a marketing team. He kicks butt when he needs to and he acts when he needs to. Quan tries to sell the various relationships that Marvin has with each of the side characters. And yet he is utterly miscast; Marvin in the script is someone with pathos and a dark past the creeps into a well-rehearsed but artificial cheerfulness. Quan’s earnest kindness is never artificial. He cannot convincingly brood or simmer. He is an unyielding beacon, and so he is not Marvin.

I’ve run out of nice and half-nice things to say. This script is an outright catastrophe. I legitimately could not follow parts of the criminal backstory of a heist gone wrong. The various grievances and betrayals are nothing but white noise. Visions of an alternate Marvin lazily evoke the multiverse concept from Everything Everywhere All at Once as an in-joke for Quan fans, but this concept is not even half-baked. Love Hurts’ script is so sloppy, so loosely resembling a real crime story but never mechanically functioning as one, that I genuinely wonder if the team of three screenwriters came up with the outline using a generative AI model.

Ariana DeBose gives an early candidate for the worst performance of 2025. I do not know what she is up to in this. She tries to smolder with Quan, but there are simply no sparks. It’s not like the script is doing her any favors: Neither the screenplay nor the actress can decide if she’s a femme fatale or a girl next door or a criminal mastermind or a streetwise badass. She is supposed to be the titular “love,” the life-altering wrench in the gears of Marvin’s life as if this is Casablanca and he’s Rick and she’s Ilsa, but it’s all a big wet noodle. (Incidentally, DeBose handed Quan his Oscar trophy, and her choked up announcement of his name is part of the reason it’s so touching.)

Even the action is mis-calibrated. It’s too bloody and visceral. Part of what I love about the early action segments is that it has a thumpy, rhythmic pace with little stabbing or blood. Later scenes involve a lot more piercing and spurting, and it’s nastier than the tone of the movie around it even when it’s gracefully produced. (There is an impressive fight scene with a plastic straw as the central weapon that I marveled at.)

The worst of it all may be the pacing. If you’re here for the fun action, I get it. But you’re going to hate the middle 40 minutes of this film where we get only a minute or two of fight scenes in between endless dialogue scenes. It’s lots of dead-air piffle and side characters quipping. Snatches of it here and there work — there’s a D-plot of Marvin’s assistant falling in love with a hitman that is weirdly effective — but, good God, why make your entire second act a sludgy void in your action comedy?

I guess what I find most discouraging is that Love Hurts has the distinct sheen and stink of “content” rather than “film.” It’s crapped onto a conveyor belt that feeds briefly into theaters then into one of the four corporate streaming platforms. Either the ledger tallies up a few bucks or else writes off a loss for tax harvesting. Win-win for shareholders, lose-lose for viewers. Ke Huy Quan’s Hollywood capital has burned in a stinker.

Although I’m tempted to slap bottom marks on Love Hurts, I feel some restraint. Part of my generosity is that the action is intermittently quite good, and there are little needles of energy and charm poking out here and there. There’s precedent, too; I gave Ghosted a 2 out of 8, and that film might be more functional than this, but it is more deeply a product of the soulless content factory. (It probably deserved a 1.) Mainly, though, I just can’t give a 1-out-of-8 to Short Round.

Is It Good?

Not Good (2/8)

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Dan is the founder and head critic of The Goods. Follow Dan on Letterboxd. Join the Discord for updates and discussion.