Love Hurts

Rated R • Theaters

Ke Huy Quan is having quite the moment. The child star of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984) and The Goonies (1985) had left acting for three decades before coming out of nowhere to win an Academy Award for Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022). Since then, he’s been popping up everywhere, and now he improbably stars in his own vehicle, Love Hurts.

Quan plays Marvin Gable, a real estate agent whose only passion in life is to get you into the house you’ll love. But real estate wasn’t Marv’s first love: He used to be the underworld’s most feared contract killer before he applied himself to the arts of residential property. On Valentine’s Day, his carefully constructed life gets demolished when a ghost from his past decides not to stay dead.

Ariana DeBose plays Rose, the meddling love interest who drags the unwilling Marv back to his violent ways, and The Goonies co-star Sean Astin makes an appearance as Marv’s inspiring real-estate mentor.

The fast-paced movie doesn’t indulge in fluff. Fists are flying as fast as the jokes in this 83-minute sprint of a film, but Love Hurts isn’t a feel-good movie with broad appeal. The movie is rated R for strong bloody violence and language throughout. The martial arts action is polished, but brutal. There’s too much gore, and Marv absorbs a ludicrous amount of punishment. The humor, however, doesn’t always land with the same force as the punches, and I found it especially jarring to hear blasphemies from Sean Astin who’s become something of a staple in Christian movies.

Not only was this film created to capitalize on Ke Huy Quan’s rising popularity, but it seems the filmmakers intended it to be a metaphor for his acting career. Just like Marv, Quan has returned from obscurity to shake things up. It’s too bad the movie is so morally dubious. At one point, Astin’s character gives a speech about absolution, but I’m not sure the filmmakers know what the word means. It seems we’re supposed to admire Rose for trying to rescue Marv from respectability, and we’re asked to celebrate his descent into violence as he supposedly embraces his true self. That’s not my kind of absolution.