Love Hurts: A painful outcome

Love Hurts (2025) • View trailer

2 stars (out of five). Rated R, for strong bloody violence, gore and relentless profanity

Available via: Movie theaters

By Derrick Bang

Ke Huy Quan, still fresh from his Oscar win for Everything Everywhere All at Once, can’t be blamed for capitalizing on his renewed 15 minutes of fame.

 

But one could wish he chose his projects more carefully.

 

When Rose (Ariana DeBose) rashly decides to come out of hiding, she hopes to enlist
Marvin (Ke Huy Quan) in her scheme to seek revenge for past events. Alas, Marvin
doesn't wish to wreck the comfortable life he has build ... but will he have a choice?

At its best — and I use that term very loosely — this fitfully amusing guilty pleasure can be regarded as a more vicious nod to Jackie Chan’s chaotic, exploit-the-surroundings martial arts style.

Quan has serious taekwondo chops, having spent his 20-year acting hiatus working as an action/stunt consultant under the tutelage of Hong Kong director/choreographer Corey Yuen. Quan displays all the right moves here, employing everything from office furniture to laptops while handling everything (literally) thrown at him by stunt coordinator Can Aydin.

 

This film’s wafer-thin plot — cobbled together by scripters Matthew Murray, Josh Stoddard and Luke Passmore — also gets points for its mordant humor. One baddie fancies himself a poet; a second one can’t figure out how to patch things up with his wife; the Valentine’s Day setting repeatedly comes into play.

 

But stunt coordinator-turned-first-time-director Jonathan Eusebio and his writers break the cardinal rule of such films: Killing innocents isn’t kosher ... and it’s a particularly egregious sin when their demise is accompanied by a slice of gratuitously tasteless gore.

 

Eusebio’s film lurches to an abrupt stop when he so indulges ... and, in the blink of an eye, the fun drains away.

 

Never to return.

 

(The endless F-bombs also don’t help.)

 

Marvin Gable (Quan), a realtor heading his own Milwaukee firm, has achieved considerable success thanks to the savvy care and charm with which he matches prospective buyers with their imagined dream homes. Alas, a crimson envelope shatters his routine on this particular February 14; it’s from Rose (Ariana DeBose), a former partner-in-crime whom he long ago left for dead.

 

But before he can consider the implications of her reappearance, Marvin is attacked by the hulking Raven (Mustafa Shakir); the subsequent skirmish destroys Marvin’s office, the cacophony somehow failing to be noticed by the rest of his staff.

 

Even executive assistant Ashley (Lio Tipton) regards the noise behind her boss’ closed door with little more than mild curiosity, but she has an excuse: cynicism and disillusionment with life, exacerbated by the hearts-and-flowers trappings of this contrived “day of love.”

Reminiscence: Not worth remembering

Reminiscence (2021) • View trailer

One star (out of five). Rated PG-13, for violence, drug use, sexual candor and profanity

Available via: Movie theaters and HBO Max

By Derrick Bang • Published in The Davis Enterprise, 8.27.21

Ugh.

 

Plodding, ponderous, pretentious twaddle.

 

Not even Hugh Jackman’s considerable charisma can save this one.

 

Nick (Hugh Jackman) and his colleague Watts (Thandiwe Newton) begin a memory
retrieval session with an uncooperative client, who's about to reveal something
that'll come as a nasty shock.

Actually, that’s part of the problem. Writer/director Lisa Joy obliterated Jackman’s charisma, transforming him into a mope with very little in the way of redeeming qualities.

Lineage counts for a lot; my expectations were low, knowing that Joy is one of the key show-runners who turned HBO’s update of Westworld into similarly tedious nonsense with delusions of grandeur. And — sure enough — she lives down to my worst fears with her feature film debut.

 

Reminiscence steals the futuristic Blade Runner look as the setting for an Inception-style dive into a reality constantly muddled by recaptured memories, the “twist” being that we’re often not sure which is which. That’s hardly a novel concept, nor is this clichéd premise helped by the fact that we don’t give a damn about any of these characters.

 

They’re worse than one-dimensional; they’re simply dull. 

 

Joy’s clumsy attempt to further spice this thin gruel with Raymond Chandler’s hard-edged noir sensibilities — as was done so much better in Blade Runner — is laughable.

 

Were it not for the stunning visuals crafted by production designer Howard Cummings and special effects maestro Peter Chesney, this would be a total bomb.

 

The setting is Miami, at some undetermined point in the future. The ocean has risen, due to a climate apocalypse, transforming the city into an American Venice. Water is everywhere; the lower floors of entire blocks of buildings are submerged. (Apparently this hasn’t affected anything structurally, which seems highly unlikely; Joy’s script isn’t long on real-world consequences.)

 

The chasm between the rich and everybody else has shifted onto fraught new territory: those who can afford to live on dry ground — giving an entirely new meaning to the phrase “land baron” — and everybody else. The result was some sort of war, its outcome left vague (along with everything else in Joy’s sloppy narrative).

 

Daytime temperatures are dangerously hot, prompting most people to live at night. Even allowing for this narrative element, Joy and cinematographer Paul Cameron go overboard with dark rooms, darker shadows and even darker streets; it’s sometimes difficult to determine what’s happening in a given scene. (If Cameron had dialed the illumination down a bit further, we’d have been spared having to watch the film at all.)

Tomb Raider: Stylish thrills, chills and spills

Tomb Raider (2018) • View trailer 
Four stars. Rated PG-13, for violence, dramatic intensity and breif profanity
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 3.16.18

Most big-screen adaptations of video games have been an eye-rolling waste of time, but Lara Croft always had an advantage: She was created, back in 1996, as the kick-ass female answer to Indiana Jones ... and we all know how well that franchise turned out.

Having run afoul of some young Hong Kong thugs determined to rob her, Lara (Alicia
Vikander) evades pursuit in the most flamboyant manner at hand.

Lara is similarly alive and well, in her newest cinema outing. Alicia Vikander is perfect for the part — radiating intelligence, spunk, resourcefulness and the never-say-die stamina of the Energizer Bunny — and this film should please both fans and mainstream newcomers. Norwegian director Roar Uthaug has delivered a rip-snortin’ adventure with just enough back-story and character development to mildly stretch the acting chops of a cast that treats this popcorn nonsense with respect.

Indeed, it’s marvelous to note that the current generation of upper-echelon Hollywood talent is willing to swing between serious fare and light-hearted thrills. Jennifer Lawrence continues to honor her X-Men and Hunger Games roots; Viola Davis popped up in Suicide Squad; Eddie Redmayne has embraced the Harry Potter franchise; and now Vikander has become the new Lara Croft. They’re all Oscar winners, and more power to them.

Just as every generation seems to need a new and youthful Spider-Man, Lara has been re-imagined not quite a generation after Angelina Jolie first donned the boots, shorts and tank top back in 2001 and ’03. Vikander adds a playful sparkle to the role — Jolie, good as she was, always felt a bit too grim — and this film’s script touches all the essential franchise ingredients.

We must remember that Lara is a tragic heroine, and Vikander deftly handles that duality. Lara’s cheerful exterior can’t quite mask the pain behind her eyes; as this story opens, her beloved father, Lord Richard Croft (Dominic West), has been missing for seven years. He had a habit of swanning off on unspecified “missions” that had little to do with the stuffy corporate stuff typical of his public face; he never returned from the last one.

Refusing to believe him dead, resisting entreaties from Croft Holdings solicitor Yaffe (Derek Jacobi) and business executive Ana Miller (Kristin Scott Thomas) to accept the corporate control that would make her financially secure, Lara instead lives hand-to-mouth as an underpaid East London bike courier. This position certainly sharpens her reflexes; it also leads to the film’s first way-cool action sequence, in the form of a captivating bicycle race assembled slickly by editors Stuart Baird, Tom Harrison-Read and Michael Tronick.