The Results of the Marshawn Lynch Movie Experiment Are In!
Here's to hoping 'Love Hurts' normalizes Marshawn as an actor and kills most of the other things it does.
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The results from the great “put Marshawn Lynch in movies” experiment are in, and the verdict is… pretty good?
BeastMode, who is actually listed as Marshawn ‘BeastMode’ Lynch in the credits like a pro wrestler, is easily a better actor than Dennis Rodman or Lebron James or maybe even James Brown (Lawrence Taylor did an incredible job in Any Given Sunday, but he was basically playing Lawrence Taylor). I’m not ready to say that Marshawn Lynch is the best athlete-turned-actor of all time, but there’s certainly potential.
In case you missed it, Lynch stars opposite Ke Huy Quan, the Oscar-winning former Short Round from Indiana Jones, in Love Hurts, an action comedy-ish riff on Quan’s turn in Everything Everywhere. This time Quan plays an ex-assassin trying to go straight as a real estate agent in Wisconsin. Which is a fine enough premise for an action movie, I guess, I just wish I could say the same for the movie that I can say about Lynch.
It’d be great if Love Hurts could normalize a few things, like putting BeastMode in films and releasing 83-minute movies in theaters. Alas I don’t think it will be normalizing much of anything, and anyway, we probably blew past the semantic limits of the word “normalizing” at least five years ago. Love Hurts, a Valentine’s Day punch-em-up directed by long-time stunt pro Jonathan Eusubio in his directorial debut, ends up mostly exploring the limits of stunt casting and defining why movies also need the Coco Chanel rule.
What was it that Chanel supposedly said? Before you leave the house you should always look at yourself in the mirror and remove one accessory?
Love Hurts definitely needed that. You can have Marshawn Lynch as a heavy, Sean Astin in a cowboy hat, one of the guys from Property Brothers as a real estate agent who does karate, and two separate bad guys wearing ascots (one of them played by Cam Gigandet), but you can’t have all of those things, at least not if you want your movie to be something other than exhausting. Stunt casting can be fun, but it can’t all be stunt casting. Love Hurts is very much from the all-frosting-no-cake school of filmmaking. Oh, and did I mention that there’s also a mob assassin called “The Raven” who throws darts with black feathers at people when he’s not writing poetry? Yep.
Okay, the plot: Quan plays Marvin Gable, a chipper Wisconsin real estate who starts receiving cryptic Valentine’s Day cards from someone from his past. That someone turns out to be Rose (Ariana DeBose), an embezzling former mafia associate who Gable was supposed to kill, but didn’t, on account of he loves her. Now she’s back and she’s sick of hiding, and so she’s trying to start a war with Marvin’s old employer, thus screwing up the tidy little real estate life that he’s since built for himself. All of the themes, such as they are, are spelled out in excruciating detail by characters just saying them out loud in extemporaneous monologues.
Much chopping and socking ensues, with the Raven (Mustapha Shakir) throwing feathers, BeastMode saying “BeastMode!” before running through a wall (yep), and Cam Gigandet wearing an ascot for some reason. While BeastMode more than holds his own as an actor, it’s also true that Love Hurts contains an abundance of bad acting (*cough* Gigandet! *cough, cough*). I made ripping on Cam Gigandet sort of a running joke on FilmDrunk (and it’s still pretty fun) but we can admit that it’s probably not his fault here. Most of Love Hurts dialogue is so detached from anything character-based that it feels more like people in silly costumes reading zany Reddit posts. Ariana DeBose is an Oscar-winner (Love Hurts stars two Oscar winners!) and even she seems thoroughly out of place attempting mustache-twirling bad girl monologues that include the word “perchance.” Methinks no, good sir. Forsooth.
Mostly Love Hurts is a forgettable February release, but it’s perhaps worth a few words about the state of the modern action movie. Probably we’ve become spoiled with good fight choreography, but can I admit how bored I’ve become with most of these kinds of stunts? There are still some good stunt movies, but movies like Rebel Ridge seem to suggest that the buildup is as important as the punching, and movies like RRR seem to suggest that a full break with realism works better than the awkward middle ground most of these movies inevitably fall into.