Apparently I’m the only person in the entire world that loved this movie…
I don’t know if I could say that Love Hurts is good movie, but I can say that I loved it. There are a lot of movies out there that we love despite not being ‘good’, and it’s hard to put your finger on how any movie manages to do this.
To be clear, I don’t like this movie because it’s so bad that it’s fun to watch. That’s a different category of enjoyable bad movies. This is a movie that is fun and charming despite its shortcomings.
There are so many shitty movies being made these days, when I saw this, I didn’t even realize it was bad. I’d watched it and loved it, and told everyone that there was finally a new-ish movie worth watching. Only then did I look the movie up and find out that it got terrible reviews and nobody else liked it. In fact, after asking around, it seemed like I was the only person that liked the movie at all.
In a way, that made the movie even more special to me, and caused me to like it even more.
It isn’t hard to identify the movie’s shortcomings. Many of these you can forgive because those shortcomings are allowed under its genres. Cheesy dialogue, predictability, silly plot – all acceptable for action movies and rom-coms. You could argue that the characters push the limits of what you can get away with in an action movie, the gimmicks are so manufactured. The villain with a quirky vice (always drinking boba), the assassin poet labouring over a poem when confronting his victim, the retired assassin that is overcompensating for his past crimes by being ultra pleasant and bringing cookies for everyone at the office. I’m not going to defend those things.
The most jarring aspect of the movie was its conflicting tone. It is clearly influenced by Jackie Chan, and carries a similar tone: it is fun and whimsical – not too serious, and you’re pretty sure no one is really going to get hurt. Love Hurts deviates from this, at its peril I don’t know if I realized how important it was that there are very few fatalities in a Jackie Chan movie, but in many ways the fabric of the movie depends on it. When that rule is broken, it is very jarring, and the viewer can’t help but feel a little betrayed. The cold-blooded murder of a likable character with a boba straw feels very out of place, as does Ke Huy Quan’s killing spree late in the movie.
But
The characters are still fun. Any failures in the script seem to be made up for by great performances. The cast is great. The character designs are great. The action scenes are *great*. The action scenes, more than any other aspect of the movie, draw from Jackie Chan in all the best ways. Each one tells its own little story and is artistically and creatively choreographed. As an action movie, it can get by on these on its own. That killing spree at the end, as much as it didn’t fit the tone of the movie, it wouldn’t have made a lot of sense for the hero, vengefully free from restraint, to have a non-lethal knife fight against his brother’s goons. I know Jackie Chan would have written the scene to be fighting all those knives with a bottle of coke, but I think that the filmmakers chose the action scene they wanted instead of remaining consistent with the established tone of the movie. It’s a good scene, so I get it.
Other redeeming qualities are the movie’s length and pacing. At a remarkably tight 83 minutes, the first action scene kicks off in the first five minutes, and the movie just keeps rolling from there – thick with style and fun. It’s easy to forgive the movie’s many shortcomings because it moves past them so fast.
And of course, it always makes it easier to love a movie when you love the characters in it. Ke Huy Quan and Ariana De Bose, for me, do a great job of playing Marvin Gable and Rose Carlisle.
Ke Huy Quan is so impossibly likeable, and he always has been. Since Data and Shortround in Goonies and Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom – 4 decades ago, he’s never been anything but endearing.
Ariana DeBose, is dripping with style, and it’s very easy to love her Rose Carlisle.
The rest of the cast was also great, and all that adds up to a movie with a lot of heart, and for me that comes through and I can’t help enjoy it.
I watched all the DVD special features; it looks like they had a ton of fun making this movie – I actually felt sad when I found out that everyone thought the movie was terrible. To love this thing and work so hard on it, and put it out and think its great, and then have every single person shit on it. It didn’t seem fair. I loved the movie! I did! If I ever meet one of them in the street, I really just want to put look them straight in the eye and say, “Hey. That movie, Love Hurts that everyone said they hated? Well I thought it was great. And I loved it.”