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.
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In general though, the film is indebted, as Everything Everywhere was before it, to Edgar Wright’s Scott Pilgrim vs the World. A visual gag showing Marvin leaping over a series of garden fences suggests that Eusebio also admires Wright’s Hot Fuzz. As Valentine’s Day treats go, however, Love Hurts is the cinematic equivalent of a wilted bouquet from a petrol station forecourt.
Love Hurts is out on 6 February in Australia, and on 7 February in the US and UK.
