'Love Hurts' Is a Full-Blown Valentine’s Day Massacre

In the post-MCU, post-COVID world we live in now, it’s genuinely rare for a movie as wretched as Love Hurts to make it into theaters. Studios play it so safe that most films released in 3,000 theaters are mediocre, focus-tested, algorithm-approved features that have, in some ways, simply lowered the bar for what is considered good.

What’s almost unique about Love Hurts in 2025, the year of our Lord David Zaslav, is just how fearlessly, defiantly it sucks. Love stinks. But not in the way so much of the streaming paste we encounter stinks—this movie fails on every level. The writing is atrocious, the directing is embarrassing, everyone is painfully miscast, and even the fight choreography straight-up blows. I honestly don’t know if I’ve seen a theatrical release this bad since the mid-2010s.

What’s even more remarkable is that Love Hurts doesn’t take big swings. There’s nothing risky about it except the woefully misguided decision to pair Ke Huy Quan and Ariana DeBose as “romantic” leads. DeBose won an Oscar in 2022 and Ke Huy Quan in 2023, and someone must have thought: Let’s throw a supporting actor and a supporting actress Oscar winner together in a genre mishmash and see what happens. And for good measure, let’s cast the profoundly likable former NFL player Marshawn Lynch as an assassin. It has to be seen to be believed, but it’s some of the most poorly conceived casting I’ve ever witnessed.

It doesn’t help that we’re supposed to believe Ke Huy Quan’s Marvin Gable was a villainous monster who regularly put “bodies in holes” before he put “families in homes.” Ke Huy Quan works as a goofy dad type with secret ass-kicking abilities. He does not work as a goofy dad type who secretly led a life as a ruthless henchman.

And DeBose? She is all over the place. Her character’s personality shifts multiple times, but mostly she vamps as a lethal femme fatale in a profoundly over-the-top performance that should be the stuff of Razzies legend. If she’d gone just a little further, it might have been fun, but instead, it mostly elicits a “What are you doing, Ariana?” reaction.

Rhys Darby and Sean Astin have small roles, too, and while Astin’s Texas accent is a choice, his likability somehow makes him feel like the only genuine character in the entire film. That certainly does not include Lio Tipton, who plays an emo secretary in Marvin’s real estate office who falls hard for the poetry of a hardened assassin played by Mustafa Shakir. Woof.

The film is the directorial debut of stuntman-turned-stunt-coordinator Jonathan Eusebio, and clearly, someone thought Eusebio could make the transition as seamlessly as David Leitch or Chad Stahelski. The real shame, however, is that not only is everything else about the film horrendous but so are the action sequences. The stunts might have been more impressive if not for the bad editing—it’s choppy and occasionally gravity-defying, but not in a good way, more like in a way where you can almost see the wires.

There’s something almost thrilling about seeing a movie this bad on the big screen. Every choice feels like a huge mistake, especially the decision to release it in theaters instead of dumping it on Hulu or Netflix, where it could quietly fade into the algorithm. This is the kind of bad movie that could kill careers, and while I hope it doesn’t, I’m almost impressed that Universal Pictures had the audacity to put Love Hurts out there, knowing just how spectacularly awful it is.