Love Hurts (2025)

On the one hand, it's unfair to dismiss a film because it compares unfavourably to another film it wasn't necessarily trying to compete with. On the other hand, I ended up watching Love Hurts soon after watching Fight Or Flight, and it was immediately obvious that the latter film seemed to get everything right that this film, sadly, gets wrong.

Ke Huy Quan plays a realtor, Marvin Gable, who seems very content with his life. He's a mild and cheery fellow, happy to have left behind a life that was surprisingly stuffed full of violence and death. But that life won't stay left behind, and Marvin finds his life upended when Rose Carlisle (Ariana DeBose) reappears. This leads to Marvin being hunted down by a number of killers employed by his brother, Alvin (Daniel Wu), which makes it very difficult for him to keep his past a secret.

I am not surprised that this is the first film directed by Jonathan Eusebio. I am also not surprised that writers Matthew Murray, Josh Stoddard, and Luke Passmore don't really have many other features of note to their name. That's the main feeling you get when watching Love Hurts, it's a film made by people ready to make the most of a talented stunt team in the hopes of distracting viewers from a very weak and very familiar plot. It's a shame that the stunt team didn't get the memo. 

There's a lot here to appreciate, and I am never going to claim that I could do even a quarter of the physical stuff that many of these performers can do, but Love Hurts is disappointingly repetitive and unimaginative when it should have been an opportunity for everyone to bring some crazy ideas to the table and see how many gags could be squeezed into every main action sequence. As many others said before I even saw this, Love Hurts is a film that you end up willing to do better for most of the runtime. And that's mainly down to Quan in the lead role.

Trying to make the most of his recent success and praise, Quan is someone who is very easy to like. He puts himself across as very sweet and unassuming, and he has a fantastic athleticism that deserves to be showcased in front of the camera. DeBose carries herself through the film with the kind of carefree and cool presence that makes the connection between the leads easy enough to believe in. As for the villains, they're a good mix of real menace (Wu) and quirky killers (Marshawn Lynch, André Eriksen, Cam Gigandet, and Mustafa Shakir). Lio Tipton also has a supporting role, playing a colleague who ends up caught up in the madness unfolding around our hero, but the way that the movie pushes her closer to the character played by Shakir is just far too silly. And it would be remiss not to mention the cameo from Sean Astin, which leads to a genuinely sweet and moving payoff, thanks to the baggage brought to the film by the shared legacy that he and Quan have as lifelong Goonies.

I liked Love Hurts, but I felt as if I had to work hard to like it in spite of itself. It's a mess, it's disappointingly unable to maintain any decent energy or momentum, and many of the fights feel like the same moves being used over and over again (not saying they ARE that way, but they feel like it). Maybe everyone can put their heads together and have another go at making something worthier of Quan's time and energy.

6/10

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Kraven The Hunter (2024)

Now that I have FINALLY got into reading some of the many comics that have proven to be such fertile ground for Hollywood, I tend to know a number of the characters I would have never even heard of years ago. Which explains why I ended up looking forward to Kraven The Hunter, another of the Sony movies making use of a Spider-Man character without having Spider-Man actually in the movie. I have read the earliest comics to feature Kraven The Hunter, and I thought that he was an entertaining character who could be placed in a fun movie. Of course, that opinion was affected by knowing that he was to be played by Aaron Taylor-Johnson (I'm not really a fan), but I still decided that I would try to have some fun.

The plot is tosh, a mess of a script written by Richard Wenk, Art Marcum, and Matt Holloway (all the more disappointing because of how much I love some of Richard Wenk's directorial work), but it essentially gives us the origin story of the title character, someone who uses his powerful animalistic skillset to hunt poachers and villains. Once he sets his sights on someone, that person is as good as dead, and the highlight of this film is the determination and savagery with which Kraven despatches those who end up on his bad side.

Director J. C. Chandor isn't used to working with this kind of material, but he does a decent enough job with some of the action moments. Maybe I'm just worn down from the bad stuff that we've seen from Sony over the past few years, but this never seemed as bad as anything else they've given us. The CGI is uneven, but not completely awful, and Kraven feels as if he has proper teeth and claws. There just isn't enough here to distract people from a fairly wea script, and a large part of that is to do with the eminently forgettable villains (there are at least three, but only one works, and that's Russell Crowe, enjoyably hamming things up with another accent in the role of Aleksei Sistevich, the father of our "hero").

Taylor-Johnson is okay in the role, trying to maintain a serious face in the middle of some ridiculous moments, but there's always someone better available for pretty much every role he gets. Someone with a bit more charisma, and maybe someone better able to convey humour, would have been welcome, although I'm not sure I could give any specific examples. As I've just said, Crowe is fun, but that's all the praise I can offer. Poor Ariana DeBose tries hard in a thankless role, as a woman named Calypso who ends up helping Kraven more than once, Fred Hechinger barely registers as Dmitri (Kraven's brother), and both Alessandro Nivola and Christopher Abbott play the other two main villains, forgettable as soon as they're offscreen).

This isn't great, but it's polished and entertaining in a way that the previous film in this flop-tastic movie series wasn't. I didn't have a terrible time, and the fact that this ended up taking even less at the box office than either Morbious or Madame Web feels slightly unfair. It's certainly not anywhere close to being as bad as the latter. I wish some better decisions had been made, but I also know that I could easily sit down and rewatch this without feeling the overwhelming urge to rip off my own head. How's that for a ringing endorsement?

6/10

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Argylle (2024)

The publicity and marketing for Argylle seemed to signify that it was going to be a fun spy romp for film fans. It would though, of course, because publicity and marketing is designed to get us all eager to buy whatever is being sold. Then the film was released, seemed to stumble at the box office (which may be putting it mildly), and one negative review after another started to make it clear that this wasn’t going to be a shining star in the 2024 movie calendar.

I am not sure why others seemed to hate this quite so much. I enjoyed it. I am not going to say that I loved it, and there are certainly moments that go a bit too far (in terms of the ridiculousness, the CGI, or both), but I had a fun time while it was on, and I would easily watch it again. It will never be top of my rewatch pile though.

Bryce Dallas Howard plays a writer, Elly, responsible for a successful series of spy novels about a special agent named Argylle. It is a world far removed from her own, where she simply likes to stay comfortable and spend time with her cat (Alfie), but worlds collide when she is approached by a real spy (Aidann, played by Sam Rockwell). People are after Elly, believing that she knows far too much about the world she is writing about, and there are twists and turns on the way to a final act that will ultimately reveal the true identity of “Argylle”.

It doesn’t matter if you are unfamiliar with writer Jason Fuchs, someone who has a limited number of full screenplay credits. The writing here is one of the least interesting components, and the plot is full of too many big holes throughout. This isn’t a well-constructed piece of work. It is a slice of silliness that seems designed to let director Matthew Vaughn have fun with some ridiculous set-pieces. That is how I saw it anyway, and that is how I managed to enjoy it. Not every action sequence works, but at least four of them kept me hugely entertained for the duration.

It helps that the cast is so good. Maybe I am missing a lot of the conversation happening around this, but I don’t think it can be underestimated how atypical Howard is for this kind of lead role. Does it make sense? No, but the way she is used here more than makes up for the lack of logic. She has to spend most of the first half of the movie looking dazed and vulnerable, but the second half gives her a lot more to do, and she acquits herself well. Rockwell gets one of his most fun roles in recent years, being the light-hearted and cocky pro that he does so well, and always ready to dance at any opportunity. Cavill is fun as the fictional avatar, even if he doesn’t suit the bad hairstyle he is given, and there is room for fun performances from Catherine O’Hara, Bryan Cranston, and, to a much lesser extent, and I do mean MUCH lesser, Samuel L. Jackson, John Cena, Dua Lipa, and Ariana DeBose.

I can see why this wasn’t a resounding success, mainly because of the plotting and the overuse of CGI, as well as a fairly lengthy runtime, and there are a few too many edits between Rockwell and Cavill as we are shown the action from the befuddled POV of our main character, but I just don’t see why it has been so lambasted. The big moments that work, in my view, work really well, including an action sequence on a train that is as energetic and inventive as I hoped it would be. Okay, the film doesn’t maintain that standard throughout, but it keeps trying, and Vaughn once again tries hard to complement his visuals with just the right soundtrack (although maybe it is obvious this time around that he is trying a bit too hard). 

Admittedly a bit complicated and needlessly confusing at times, which stems from the lack of proper plausibility in the plot, this is a good film that tries to be great fun, but only succeeds occasionally in that regard. It’s a mess, sure, but a messy film isn’t automatically a bad film, and I remain in the minority of people who will insist that this isn’t actually a bad film.

6/10

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