This hurts me to say: Love Hurts is garbage

First there was Jackie Coogan: star of 1921's The Kid, one of the first modern child stars and good enough at it to be billed as "the most famous boy in the world." After his parents — legally, as it turned out — stole all of his money, he worked in off-and-on obscurity, before landing the role that would come to define him: Uncle Fester in the 1960s series The Addams Family. In his final performance, for 1982's The Escape Artist, he would even retain enough star appeal to appear on the poster.

Then, Bobby Driscoll: Disney's darling, cherubic voice of Peter Pan, face of Jim Hawkins in Treasure Island and recipient of an Academy Award at only 12 — fired once his no-longer-quite-so-adorable teenaged face took him out of the running for similar roles. He died, unknown, from drug-related complications at just 31, buried in an unmarked pauper's grave.

And now, there's Ke Huy Quan and his most recent endeavour, Love Hurts. The movie itself — an action vehicle about a hit-man drawn back in for one last job — doesn't deserve the space it would take up in your brain. But when it comes to Quan, as an archetype for the uniquely terrible experience of former child stars, he fits right in.

An early star and trailblazer for young Asian actors in The Goonies and Indiana Jones, he's given the proverbial boot as the cute, hireable kid grows into an entirely different man. After years wandering in the Hollywood wilderness, the start of his return begins: an Oscar-winning performance in Everything Everywhere All At Once, a tear-filled acceptance speech on the hardship of closed doors and joy of being welcomed back — and enough public goodwill to fill an Olympic-sized swimming pool.

This is exactly where the path forks. Because other than for the hopeful few who disembark fame early enough to find nondescript careers as veterinarians or near witness protection-level obscurity, there are only ever really two outcomes for the struggling former child actor: redemption story, or tragedy.

1st live-action since 2022

That puts a lot riding on Love Hurts, Quan's first live-action film role since Everything Everywhere, and one he reportedly rejected twice over concerns about where he wanted his career to go next. In it, he plays Marvin Gable, a realtor so optimistic he offers his employee heart-shaped cookies and bumper sticker platitudes as a cure for the Valentines Day admission that they don't much feel like living anymore. 

From there, the "pains of love" metaphor gets a lot more literal. A hulking, poetry-reciting hit-man calling himself (ugh) "The Raven" (Mustafa Shakir) breaks into Gable's office, and knocks him out cold.

When Gable awakens, with one hand zip-tied to a chair and the other pinned to his desk with a knife, we learn he used to be an elite enforcer for his kingpin brother Knuckles (Daniel Wu), before escaping into the aggressively bland life of suburban real estate. And that's when The Raven breaks the bad news: unfortunately for Gable, he apparently left some business unfinished. 

Rose (Ariana DeBose), the double-crossing thief he was supposed to have killed on his brother's orders, is somehow still alive. And she's coming back for everyone who crossed her. Oh yeah, and Gable is in love with her. 

What follows are all the standard John Wick-esque battles that read like Halloween night at the dojo. We have our giant but gentle Raven, we have our bumbling henchmen tag team of Otis (André Eriksen) and King (Marshawn Lynch). We have an aww-shucks Sean Astin as the cowboy-hatted Cliff Cussick, who is apparently Gable's ostensibly beloved, adoptive family. Despite having actual familiarities off-screen from their time co-starring in The Goonies, here, the two share all of one exposition-heavy scene together. 

There are cheesy lines, there is a boss battle — there's even a committed, if deeply odd, cameo by Property Brothers' Drew Scott as the karate-obsessed realtor-next-door.

An exposition dump

You could compare the "underestimated character is actually an action star" commercial reel to a million other films: from A History of Violence, to The Foreigner, to The Equalizer to Salt. Each of those are varying degrees of good — but that's something they accomplish by focusing on the character, slowly revealing their dangerous backstory, and then unleashing them for an unrelenting third act. 

It's one even seen in 2021's Nobody, the Bob Odenkirk feature helmed by 87 North Productions, which is also behind Love Hurts. Unfortunately, upon seeing the success Nobody found with that generic plot line, the company seems to feel like they've found the formula that lays golden career arcs. 

Love Hurts works more like an external construction of constituent parts: its writers — or possibly its producers — seem to have built their film from literal scenes from other movies, without understanding (or caring) how or why they worked in context: "Harry and Marv were funny in Home Alone, weren't they? Let's throw them in. Didn't Out of the Past have something about a mild-mannered guy revealing a complicated criminal past? Just copy and paste whatever works."

Love Hurts is just a clumsy exposition dump. It's built of a series of characters and events about whom you're directly told why you should care, without any time or effort put into making you want to. Its climactic finale builds into a reveal that at best makes no sense, and at worst, ends with Gable's acceptance of himself as a guy who just loves killing people and shouldn't have turned his back on it in the first place. Heartwarming, right?

And that would all be fine if it were just an excuse to get to the action. But the film also makes the unfortunate best-case argument for why the Oscars need an award for stunt choreography: It can be done beautifully, and, as Love Hurts demonstrates, it can be done lazily. 

Quan himself is adept, but the fight scenes often depart the realm of reality into a cartoonish series of moves you can clearly see were more CGI than stunt work (I'm looking at you, kitchen-island double-suplex). Others are sluggish, or merely repetitive. And aside from the minimally entertaining B-plot of The Raven's doomed love story with Gable's employee (Lio Tipton), that is all that's on offer to entertain you for an 83-minute runtime that feels more like 800.

And to be clear, this brings me no pleasure to say. Alongside the stellar comedic showing that former NFLer Marshawn (Beastmode) Lynch has built in role after role, Love Hurts has the opportunity to work as a feel-good safety net for its stars. Nothing would make me happier than to see Quan ride higher and higher still on accolades gilding his golden comeback story. 

So it hurts. Love Hurts hurts. It hurts to look at. It hurts to sit through. And it hurts me to look at a smiling Ke Huy Quan at the start of his comeback tour, and put him down like I'm Wesley Snipes in New Jack City.