Dan McCafferty was right: Love hurts (especially when you’re a former assassin).
There are two major ways to get me heavily invested in action movies: Force me to care about the leads with actual character development or make me laugh my butt off. When it comes to the 2025 movie “Love Hurts,” I barely made it through a few minutes without cackling alongside a large group of other journalists in the theater. However, I will admit that I didn’t particularly care about any of the characters beyond the surface.
Sure, I can enjoy the fruits of a good action sequence (or 100), but I need more than endless fighting to walk out of a movie satisfied. As someone who probably should have gotten a “Most Likely to Roast Herself With Self-Deprecation” superlative in high school, self-aware satire is one of my go-to genres. The more outlandish, the better.
Given that “Clueless” is arguably my favorite movie of all time, I do love a good rom-com. But as the president of the Terrified of Commitment club, I’m also here for movies that poke fun at the endless clichés that romance movies can’t get enough of.
“Love Hurts” gives audiences the best of both worlds as the story follows former assassin Marvin (Key Huy Quan) as he gets yanked out of his new mundane life as a real estate agent and back into his brother’s world of crime when an old flame returns. Whether you love love, love hating love, or just enjoy a drop-kick-filled parody, the Valentine’s Day satire has something for everyone — unless you try to take it too seriously.
‘Love Hurts’ knows precisely what it is
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Not every movie is meant to be an Oscar-winner. “Love Hurts” is the latest in a long line of heavily panned movies that maybe don’t deserve it (primarily by critics but also by a chunk of fans). I’m a major proponent of judging a movie by what it sets out to do rather than one single unwavering scale that you apply to every film. You can’t judge a movie like “Love Hurts” the same way that you would a cinematic masterpiece.
“Love Hurts” markets itself as a Valentine’s Day-centric kung fu parody and that’s precisely what it delivers. No, it’s not particularly nuanced, deeply innovative, original, or groundbreaking. It’s just fun. If you don’t like slapstick or parodies then you’ll hate it. But you would have hated it no matter what it did.
Could the movie have done more to set itself apart and make it more compelling? Definitely. It hit my box of action making me laugh, but it really misses the mark of getting audiences invested in the lead relationship where the chemistry is practically nonexistent. For some reason, though, that didn’t completely take me out of the film because the entire premise is essentially that love is ridiculous. The lack of depth can be chalked up to the movie’s message that it’s just not that deep. Love doesn’t always have a rhyme or reason. It just is. And that’s what we see.
The refreshing joy of a 90-minute movie
About an hour and 10 minutes into “Love Hurts,” I was worried that we would yet again be inundated with a two-and-a-half-hour movie. I don’t like to look at run-times or too much promo material ahead of a screening to keep my perspective fresh and unbiased. A little over an hour into the movie, I was still enjoying myself, but I knew that would change if it went past the 90-minute mark.
Not every new release needs to be two hours, and this is one of them. Keeping the run-time under an hour and a half leaves fans wanting more rather than being relieved when a movie ends. I will always respect projects that don’t overstay their welcome, and “Love Hurts” does precisely what it set out to do without dragging anything out.
Edgar Allen Poe and a soundtrack that slaps
Maybe my obsession with Edgar Allan Poe clouding my judgement a bit here — I can cop to that. Paying homage to the world’s most lovably angsty poet is a surefire way to get me on board with anything. One of my favorite reads in 2024 was the anti-self-help book “Poe for Your Problems” by Catherine Baab-Muguira — which satirizes Poe as he gives questionable life advice. It’s a mood.
“Love Hurts” has some of that energy with an assassin who writes angsty poetry, calls himself The Raven, and uses stabby feather darts as his weapon of choice. Out of every on-screen relationship depicted in the movie, I was invested in the Raven’s over-the-top and just on the edge of unbelievable romance with Marvin’s jaded, Valentine’s Day-hating assistant Ashley. She goes from wanting to shove streamer’s up a guy’s a** (and not in the fun way) to waxing poetic (literally) about the assassin poet she finds lying not-so-dead on her boss’ floor. How’s that for a meet-cute?
Whether or not you can see the merits of “Love Hurts,” there’s one thing that most people can agree on: The soundtrack slaps. You might expect the song “Love Hurts” to get some run time, but it was either too on-the-nose or out of the movie’s budget.
Either way, songs like “The Things We Do for Love” and “You’re the First, the Last, My Everything” more than make up for it. Of course, all of the biggest action sequences are paired with deep soul and sappy love songs, adding to the fun absurdity that makes the movie more charming than cringe — a line it frequently toes.
Martial arts that’s worth watching
Is “Love Hurts” reinventing the martial arts wheel? Not really. But that doesn’t make the fight sequences any less fun (or brutal) to watch. Quan in particular really shows off his skills in this department, and one of my favorite sequences is his character risking life and limb to protect a stupid employee of the month certificate.
Most of us hate corporate America, but hey, if the alternative is killing people for a living, maybe we’d hold onto the mundane grind a bit harder. Marvin’s arc of ‘getting out of the life’ isn’t a new concept in the slightest, but I was intrigued by the flipped narrative of him clinging to his new life and what it represents rather than deploring it. Like everything else in the movie, it’s over-the-top, but the absurdity of trying to sell a house while actively killing people fills my unhinged quota.
And really, I never thought I needed to see a boba straw used as a weapon (though anyone who’s ever failed to punch a hole through the top with the pointy side knows that this is actually the most unrealistic part of the film).
