Love Hurts (2025)

[Luckylyn]

There were things I enjoyed.  The cast was good.  I liked the mix of action and humor.

Unfortunately Rose and Marvin had no chemistry.  We know they are inlove because the script says so.  The movie doesn’t develop their love story at all and the actors don’t have any spark to compensate for the scripts weaknesses. The romance between the assistant and poet hitman was way more compelling. 

Rose doesn’t work as a character especially when you realize all she had to do was contact the Russians after kidnapping Kippy to get the evidence and eliminate Knuckles.  She didn’t have to ruin Marvin’s cover at all.  Knuckles didn’t even have to know she was alive except she insisted on sending those stupid cards to make sure he knew.  She could have handled it with the Russians and went to see Marvin when it was over to be with him.  She put a huge spotlight on herself revealing she was alive, destroying Marvin’s cover and getting his friend killed for no good reason.  Rose is more plot device than character.  The script needed more to justify why she would reveal herself and also upend Marvin’s life. He looks happy in his cover life so Rose comes off as awful for purposely forcing him out of it.   It’s all her telling him what he needs and what he should be and not about his feelings about his life.  They needed to show that he wasn’t happy in the cover and maybe secretly wanted out so her interference seems like helping instead of harming him. After her selfishness ruins his life I don’t understand why he would love her at all.  His best friend died totally unnecessarily because of her actions without any consideration of the collateral damage to Marvin and others around him.

Maybe they could have got her accidentally revealing herself face on a security camera when kidnapping Kippy to get the evidence and that set things motion.  The script didn’t have to make her so selfish and stupid.  There was a lot of potential but the script doesn’t work and the main romance was nonexistent.

[Browncoat]

I enjoyed it.  I posted about it in the "Movies you saw recently" thread.  I didn't take it at all seriously -- just like a Jackie Chan movie.  The only thing I missed were outtakes during the credits.

Rose wanted revenge.  She wanted to exact that revenge directly, not just by sitting back and watching the Russians take Knuckles.  Sometimes the desire for revenge makes people shortsighted and selfish.  And she didn't want to hide anymore.  Hiding ain't living.  Marvin mostly got dragged into it because Knuckles thought he knew where Rose was -- Knuckles clearly knew Marvin didn't kill Rose.  Oh, and she wanted the money.

I went in expecting a fairly mindless popcorn action/romance flick, and I got exactly what I expected.  Like I said, I enjoyed it.  It was a fun way to spend a couple of hours on a gloomy Saturday.

[StatisticalOutlier]

This was one of the worst movies I've ever seen.

I usually vet the movies I shell out for pretty carefully.  With this one, I'd only seen the trailer a few times.  There were no reviews on Metacritic yet.  But it looked like fun and I love me a fun martial arts movie.

I'm more of a high-brow filmgoer, but I've been known to enjoy a good romp.  (I recently loved One of Them Days, for example.)  I was dropping Mr. Outlier off on a mountainbike shuttle ride on Thursday afternoon and had a few hours to kill in between drop-off and pick-up, and thought, "You know what?  I'm gonna go see this one knowing nothing about it.  Wheee!"

Good heavens it was awful.

I'm a Jackie Chan fan, and Jackie's movies are mayhem and chaos but not violent.  On the one hand I was happy to see the Property Brother get killed, just out of general principle, but I did not need the camera to give me a view through the hole the bullet left in his head.  The whole movie was graphically violent, which is the antithesis of Jackie's movies.  Or even John Woo's, where you have scenes where somebody shoots up a tea house and kills a hundred people, but it's not gory.   

Plus they made dumb mistakes.  Like it was February in Milwaukee, but everybody's running around like it's summer, including the main character riding his bike around.  But I don't remember a single thing that was Milwaukee-specific, so why not set it somewhere where it's decent weather in February, if Valentine's Day is important to the plot?

And the couple who came over to the for-sale house to tell him they wanted to buy it.  But then you hear the scream from the laundry room, which of course you're supposed to think is them finding the guy tied to the chair, but no, he somehow escaped and she's screaming about the fantastic washer-dryer.  She didn't see that when she looked at the house before?

Oh, and the phone booth!  The guy escapes and runs to a pay phone to call whoever it is he called.  How many working pay phones are there left in the U.S. in February 2025?  And even if there were one, what are the odds he'd actually remember the number he needed to call?  Nobody knows any phone numbers any more (to the extent that it can be an actual plot device). 

There were lots of other things that really grated, but I can't remember them now, nor can Mr. Outlier, who got to hear ALL of them when I picked him up from his ride.  😀

And speaking of Jackie Chan, when the Russian showed up at the end, she was so straight out of lazy central casting.  It reminded me of the white American villains in Hong Kong movies who are invariably played by some big doofus with a noticeable Australian accent, who overacts.

Quote

Unfortunately Rose and Marvin had no chemistry.  We know they are inlove because the script says so.

Not just the script, but voiceovers.  So, literally the script says so.  That's some lazy filmmaking.

In retrospect, I should have killed those hours seeing One of Them Days for the second time. 

ETA:  Whew, I feel better.  Thanks for starting this thread.  I'd like to say that I didn't feel right about starting a thread just to shit all over the movie, but that's not really true.  I didn't want to dignify it myself by starting a thread.  But people need to be warned.

Edited February 11 by StatisticalOutlier

[Browncoat]

Maybe it should be billed as Jackie Chan meets Quentin Tarantino.

[Cress]

I really wanted to like this this movie based on the trailer, and the cast, but it wasn't as funny and light as I wanted. Yeah, not as good as One of Them Days.

I agree that the Russians at the end made Rose's whole revenge plot pointless. So she's just selfish and chaotic.

Here's the Pitch Meeting which points out many of the flaws.

 

[DanaK]

Streams on Peacock starting May 9

http://thefutoncritic.com/news/2025/04/25/peacock-sets-streaming-debut-dates-for-focus-features-black-bag-and-universal-pictures-love-hurts-621315/20250425peacock01/