Marvin Gable (the wonderful Ke Huy Quan) is a jumper-sporting estate agent who loves his life, bakes heart-shaped cookies for his staff, and absolutely adores his job. But he has a secret past which comes a-knocking, when the mysterious "Rose" (Ariana DeBose) returns to his life, on the run from Marvin's evil gangster brother Alvin (Daniel Wu), whom Marvin used to work for. Now, this Valentine's Day, he has to succumb to his old skills in order to fend off assassins and get his life, and his love, back...
I'm delighted to see Ke Huy Quan headlining an action movie, that's wonderful. He relishes the part, they play with his role in "Everything, Everywhere, All At Once" (his glasses and certain scenes are shot like a Wong Kar Wai movie, flashbacks of him with slicked back hair look like a Tony Leung gangster movie, there's a fight with a bubble tea straw) and he is loving life.
The movie is still frustrating and he deserves better.
The first 20 minutes are fun, great even: a mash up of 2000s romcoms and old-school Hong Kong action movies, the shifts in tone are fun, the occasional spouts of blood are not too jarring, and it's pretty funny. Mustafa Shakir turns up as a poetry-spouting, quill tossing assassin named Raven and is good fun; whilst Lio Tipton (whom I love) has carved a niche for themselves between this, "Crazy Stupid Love", "Warm Bodies" and "Mississippi Grind" as "quirky supporting character who is the best bit of the movie", this part would have been Aubrey Plaza 10 years ago, and by sheer dumb luck Tipton happens to feature in every scene which is good. They also get a lovely, fun goofy subplot with Raven, and alongside Shakir sells it. Marshawn Lynch (watch "Bottoms") and European Henry Rollins lookalike Andre Eriksen play a pair of rather amusing henchmen and have a very good fight sequence in a house, one of the highlights and showcases of Ke Huy Quan.
Then the middle of the movie happens.
It nosedives quickly, with some of the absolute worst dialogue and clunkiest exposition of recent memory grinding it to a halt, all in service of a plot simultaneously boiler plate boring, needlessly intricate and complex, and told/done almost entirely off screen. It grinds things to a halt, subtracts from the energy Ke Huy Quan had been bringing, takes valuable time away from the comedy (and Tipton, God Damn it Hollywood!) and fight scenes; it's exceedingly frustrating. A few sessions of rewrites could have streamlined this and made it a lot more coherant and cohesive, but as it stands it's a clunky steam train to tedium. Which is even more of a shame because those glimpses of greatness leap forth in the final act: Tipton and Shakir's act climaxes, there's a bombastic shootout and knife fight in a house, there's colour on screen and wonderful jokes, and it knows what it wants to be in the finale. Unfortunately the wasted potential of Act 2 means that the great stuff is buried and the poorer stuff which would be forgivable or charming (the age gap and lack of chemistry between Quan and DeBose, the non-threatening villain given to Wu who tries his best, the superfluous Cam Gigandet character) comes further to the surface and drag it down.
It's a shame really, it's a frustrating movie I wanted to work a lot more than it does, particularly with its genre mashups.
