I don’t know why we got two cheap, violent Valentine’s Day genre pictures this year, but here they are. They also both feature a straw stabbed into a face. Will wonders never cease? We’re a culture starving for sincerity, drowning in junk. So why not turn a romantic holiday into an occasion for death and mayhem? It can get pretty wearying having to look at movies brightly and noisy going nowhere if all they have is that kind of hook. Luckily the horror-comedy lark that is
Heart Eyes has a couple neat tricks up its sleeve. It runs straight into its artificiality and genre play. Director Josh Ruben, whose
Scare Me and
Werewolves Within reflect a sensibility more in love with comic horror movies than fully inhabiting anything convincing on a character level, finds the best use of his interests here. The screenplay co-written by Christopher Landon (the
Happy Death Days,
Freaky, and some
Paranormal Activity sequels, for better or worse) takes the beats of a slasher picture and places them over the structure of a romantic comedy. That’s not an easy mix to reconcile, and somehow, by serving both sides of that equation something like equally, it finds a way to work despite its wan digital look. We get the first kills and a Meet Cute, a fashion montage and a crime scene, a misunderstanding and a red herring, a needle drop and an impalement, a reconciliation and a decapitation. The arcs overlap pretty neatly. The story finds a business meeting turned first date between work rivals (Olivia Holt and Mason Gooding) interrupted by a masked serial killer whose gimmick is killing couples every February 14th. Because Holt and Gooding have some genuine sparks in their flirty banter, they give the movie the right push it needs to actually work on both levels. We’re rooting for their survival, and their relationship, in that order. Though there’s nothing novel in the over-the-top violence or sly punchlines, it’s the tension between the two that pleases enough. It’s about nothing but goofing on genre tropes, but that makes for a matinee diversion.
Way worse is
Love Hurts. There’s nothing recognizably human within, and no playfulness of form or content to make up for its total phoniness. It’s as cliched as action movies get these days. The only reason any character makes any decision is because that’s what happens in movies like this. But at least the action is pretty good, if overfamiliar. It comes to us from 87North, the production company started by the
John Wick guys to give stunt professionals a chance to direct and show off their chops. Their form of highly choreographed, faux-improvisatory fisticuffs and gunplay are now routine, but still dazzling from a logistical standpoint, even if this features combat so tight and airless it’s without tension. The feature stars Ke Huy Quan, and it’s nice to see him in a lead role to follow up his return to acting in
Everything Everywhere All at Once. If only there was a good movie built around him. Instead it is functionally identical to Bob Odenkirk’s starring role in
Nobody, another middling action movie about a retired killer whose comfortable suburban life is interrupted by deadly interlopers who must be beaten back. The plot progression is side-scroller predictable, and floats along superficially, with motivations papered over with voice over, and the whole thing barely limping past 80 minutes before giving up. The supporting cast is full of one-note eccentric characters—a killer who likes poetry, a killer who likes boba tea, and so on. Worst is the instigator character, a mob lawyer who comes out of hiding on Valentine's Day for selfish story machinations we’re eventually supposed to read as a love story, but is 100% false the entire time. She’s played by Ariana DeBose, in yet another calamitous career move. (Add one more to the unbroken string of bad movies with which she’s followed up her Oscar-winning turn in Spielberg's
West Side Story.) The whole movie is a missed opportunity for everyone involved capable of more.
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