‘Love Hurts’ and the Rise of the Hyphen-Comedy
Plus: A ‘Forrest Gump’ reunion, assigned!
Tim Miller talked to Ben Stiller on his podcast this week,1 and one thing they discussed was the paucity of comedies in filmmaking these days.
There are all sorts of reasons for this. Partly it’s because audiences have stopped showing up for comedies in theaters; as Stiller notes in the interview, studios made a bunch of great comedies for adults in the 2000s because those movies made tons of money. Between Judd Apatow’s incredible run from The 40-Year-Old Virgin through Funny People and the so-called Frat Pack, funny business was big business. Audiences don’t show up for that kind of thing anymore, so that kind of thing doesn’t really get made.
But that’s just pushing the question off a level. Why aren’t audiences showing up? Is it because comedies have migrated to Netflix, where Adam Sandler’s Happy Madison empire continues to do solid business? Maybe; a lot of comedy has certainly migrated to streaming, where the economics make a little more sense. (The cost in advertising to open a film on 3,000 screens often dwarfs a comedy’s production budget; such costs don’t really exist on streaming, particularly on Netflix, the homepage of which is the most valuable real estate in the business.) Are studio comedies too tame, too worried about hewing to modern sensibilities to really be funny? Perhaps; I do think fear of giving offense has put a damper on some comedic impulses. (As former Amazon Pictures exec Roy Price noted last year, “In unfettered environments such as standup and on YouTube and TikTok, comedy continues to thrive.”)
There’s another explanation, though, and it’s that comedy has woven itself into nearly every other genre. Call it the rise of the hyphen-comedy. This was the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s secret weapon: they were almost all pretty funny. Romcoms have grown rarer, but they’re still more common than straightforward romances or comedies. There are very few pure action movies anymore; most are really action-comedies. The Fall Guy, Bullet Train, Wolfs, etc., etc.: all movies that blend action, often quite well-executed action, with solid comedy beats. (Some also wrap the comedy and the action into a third subgenre, like Violent Night or Red One did with Christmas movies or Abigail and Renfield did with horror.)
Love Hurts is a prototypical action-comedy: Ke Huy Quan plays Marvin Gable, a mob enforcer who rejected his brother, Knuckles (Daniel Wu) and their life of crime following the supposed death of Rose (Ariana DeBose). When Rose turns up alive and ready to reveal all sorts of nasty financial shenanigans within Knuckles’s criminal empire, Marvin and Rose both are hunted by a series of oddly named (and shaped) assassins.
I don’t want to sugarcoat this: Love Hurts is, fundamentally, a very silly film, though intentionally so. For instance, one of Marvin’s nemeses is called the Raven (Mustafa Shakir), a hulking brute with a fondness for blades and bad poetry; the Raven’s burgeoning relationship with Marvin’s depressed assistant, Ashley (Lio Tipton), is played for plenty of offbeat chuckles.
King (Marshawn Lynch) and Otis (André Eriksen) are a deadly ebony-and-ivory duo, though when the massive pair are not trying to kill Marvin, King is coaching Otis through a breakup. No, screenwriters Matthew Murray, Josh Stoddard, and Luke Passmore aren’t reinventing the wheel here or anything, but the patter is funny and Lynch is a gifted comic actor, willing and able to wield his bulk and aggressive demeanor for giggles.
I keep highlighting sizes here, because director Jonathan Eusebio and stunt coordinator Can Aydin expertly mine the size differential between Quan and his antagonists for laughs. The smaller man is often getting tossed around like a ragdoll, but he deftly combines the physicality of his fighting with the mannerisms of a put-upon stiff just trying to get through the day. Lynch looks like an inverted pyramid to Quan’s beanpole; there’s a Laurel-and-Hardy quality to their fisticuffs that can’t help but amuse.
Love Hurts is an 87North production, and one thing they have mastered over the last few years in films like Bullet Train, Violent Night, and Nobody is melding comedy and violence, often by using the constraints of space and putting the action in an unusual place. The tight corridors of a high-speed rail car or a bus, the snowy wastes of a family set up for Christmas, that sort of thing. Love Hurts puts most of the action in a realtor’s office and a house on the market, using the very implements of open-house staging as part of the battleground.
And Quan’s inherently upbeat demeanor contrasts nicely with the predicament he finds himself in here; he’s not asked to do as much emotional heavy lifting here as he was in Everything Everywhere All at Once, for which he won an Oscar, but his innate decency and charm still shine through even while he’s taking (and dispensing) a beating. His messy joy bounces nicely off both the sultry DeBose (another Oscar winner) and the Goth-minded pair played by Shakir and Tipton.
Love Hurts isn’t doing anything revolutionary, but it successfully combines action and humor into silly, raucous fun, and does so in under 90 minutes. There are worse ways to spend a February evening.
On this week’s bonus episode of Across the Movie Aisle, we did a couple of a quick reviews: Companion and Dog Man. Something for the adults, something for the kids. Fun for everyone! Hope you enjoy.
Assigned Viewing: Here (Netflix)
I reviewed Here a couple of months back, but it just hit Netflix and I’d like to highlight it again since it was in and out of theaters. Which is kind of surprising, considering this movie reconnects the Forrest Gump team of director Robert Zemeckis, writer Eric Roth, and stars Tom Hanks and Robin Wright. Feels like this should have been a bigger deal! Maybe it’s a movie that will find its audience on streaming. Here’s how I described it in my review:
Though Zemeckis, who cowrote the screenplay with Eric Roth, occasionally veers toward mawkishness, Hanks and Wright are powerful enough to reassert control of the material and keep it human and humane. Considering the creative team of Zemeckis, Roth, Hanks, and Wright, comparisons to Forrest Gump will be inevitable, and while Here absolutely feels as though it’s in conversation with that film, it’s also almost aggressively the inverse of their previous effort.
On the most obvious level, it’s different because Forrest Gump hops around the world, putting its protagonist in the midst of the biggest events of the twentieth century in America, Vietnam, and elsewhere. A sort of Boomer travelogue. But Here is a movie about the average Boomer, the guy who stayed home and raised kids and occasionally watched the news but never partook of it. It’s the grunt’s-eye view of history, the nitty-gritty of paying off loans and getting kids ready for adulthood and worrying about taxes and realizing that it’s not all going to work out like you wanted.
Here is about life as most people live it, have lived it, will live it. It’s neither grandiose nor tragic; it simply is.
I dunno, maybe I’m just a sucker for this sort of stuff—Forrest Gump gets a bad rap from cinephiles because it defeated Pulp Fiction at the Oscars; while I may share that frustration, Forrest Gump is a wonderful movie and I will not abide any anti-Gump slander—but Here has the goods and also serves as an interesting formal experiment that expands the language of cinema by limiting the scope of the production.
Look, no big deal, I don’t want to interview the guy behind Severance and the still-resonant troika of The Cable Guy, Zoolander, and Tropic Thunder on The Bulwark Goes to HOLLYWOOD or anything, it’s fine. Maybe one day I’ll get to ask about his seminal performance as Tony Perkis in the kids classic Heavyweights! I’m not jealous at all!
As a critic, no one mixes frustration, dyspepsia, and levity better than the ever-striving Sonny Bunch.
You left out the seminal Ben Stiller Show on Fox, funniest half hour on teevee this side of Gary Shandling.