Movie Review: Love Hurts

·25 min·2 clips

Adam reviews 'Love Hurts,' a new action movie starring Ki-Hui Kwan as a real estate agent dragged back into his killer past.

Love Hurts lands squarely in the irritation zone. After a long stretch of housekeeping about 2025 plans, Star Wars rewatches, Marvel Disney Plus reviews, awards coverage, rankings, and anniversary programming, the host turns to the movie and sounds like he is working through the complaint in real time. The editing keeps tripping him up. A voicemail seems to play like a cell phone call and an old answering machine at once, which leaves him stuck on the basic mechanics of the scene. Then the music cue gets worse. At first, he reads the song as something only the audience can hear. Then the movie cuts to the brother's office, where the music can apparently be heard through the walls. That does not work for him. When the film later hints that the music came from a jukebox, he stops treating it as style and starts treating it as broken staging. The question is simple enough to hurt. If everyone is trying to kill the two central people, why would someone wander over and start the jukebox? The boba straw bothers him for the same reason. He focuses on how it is used in a scene with Sean Astin before the movie has made it feel like anything beyond a straw. The later reveal helps a bit. Once it turns out to be more like a knife, he accepts the detail, but still faults the movie for saving setup it needed earlier. Even a bathroom break gets pulled into the read. He leaves while paperwork is being handled, comes back to find the accountant has escaped, and treats that gap as one more place where the movie skips the connective tissue. The criticism is quick and openly incredulous. Each odd cut or delayed explanation sends him back to the same question: why choose that version of the beat? The close returns to the schedule, with more Star Wars talk with Josie, 30 Minute Reviews on Falcon and the Winter Soldier and The Acolyte, and excitement for Captain America: Brave New World.

As heard by us

A spoiler-heavy critique that is sharpest when it presses on the movie's own loose seams.

This episode offers a skeptical, detail-minded take that keeps circling the same useful pressure points: how the voicemail is staged, why the music feels meant for the audience more than the room, and why the late straw reveal can seem bolted on after the fact.

Read the full review in PlayNext →

Why you'd press play

If you like a movie cross-examined over a jukebox and a straw, press play.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

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