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HEART EYES and LOVE HURTS
Presuming, I suppose, that movie-going couples would rather spend their Valentine's Day date night with screen figures they already adored – Captain America and Paddington bear – Sony and Universal Pictures respectively debuted a pair of holiday-themed offerings the weekend prior, giving us a grisly romantic comedy in Heart Eyes and a brutal action comedy in Love Hurts. That's an awful lot of bloody carnage for one Cupid-minded two-fer. But like the poem goes: Violets are blue, roses are red / Why not spend V Day with folks getting dead?
Of the two, the preferable choice is easily director Josh Ruben's Heart Eyes, which is the rare ultra-gory slasher flick that can honestly be called delightful. That's because rather than being designed as a fright film with jokes – we get plenty of those every year – this is a romantic comedy foremost, albeit one with a hefty body count. The opening sequence suggests that Ruben's movie could lean either way, its masked killer with glowing heart-emoji eye holes first shown dispatching an obnoxious couple and their photographer during an idyllic, meticulously staged popping of the question. It's a fast, funny scene with a giddily disgusting capper. Yet our first hint that the film will find more mileage in its Nora Ephron traits than its Wes Craven ones comes with the introduction of our heroine Ally (Olivia Holt), who's like what you'd get if you put every Meg Ryan, Sandra Bullock, and Katherine Heigl rom-com lead in a blender and hit puree. Which, come to think of it, is pretty much what happens to that unlucky fiancée in Ruben's prelude.
Ally, we quickly learn, is (a) a lovely, single, mildly neurotic gal in the big city who (b) recently broke up with her boyfriend and (c) works in advertising alongside her (d) wisecracking best friend (Gigi Zumbado) under a (e) tyrannically demanding lady boss (a Southern-accented Michaela Watkins, to our enormous benefit). Before enduring another hellish day at the office, however, Ally (f) pops into a coffee shop and orders (g) the same unnecessarily complicated latte she orders every morning, only to discover that (h) a handsome, single, neurosis-free stranger named Jay (Mason Gooding) has ordered (i) the exact same unnecessarily complicated beverage. Something gets dropped between them, and bending over to pick it up, Ally and Jay accidentally butt heads. They laugh, offer an “after you” gesture, and butt heads again. Would you be surprised to learn that, despite this cutest of Meet Cutes, neither hottie asks for the other's phone number, which Ally instantly regrets? And would you be downright shocked to learn that the new-in-town Jay is the guy that Ally's boss hired to save Ally's latest campaign, and that she's now forced to answer solely to him? Crazy, I know! It's almost like all that head-butting was prophetic!
Because this intentional pileup of clichés is presented with such affection, I'd imagine that despite the many horror movies on their résumés, Ruben and screenwriters Phillip Murphy, Christopher Landon, and Michael Kennedy really like romantic comedies. Regardless, they appear to unmistakably get them, and Heart Eyes' first half-hour is deliciously rife with rom-com signposts. Listen to Ally insist that her champagne-fueled business dinner with Jay isn't a date! Watch her jealousy-kiss the guy the moment she sees her ex approaching with his new girlfriend! Holt and Gooding are so charming in their familiar Sam-and-Diane sparring, and Ruben and his writers so ferocious in hitting every expected genre beat precisely when they should, that you can almost forget there's a splatter-flick plot percolating beneath the attracted-opposites adorability of it all.
There is, though, and it finds the Heart Eyes serial killer choosing one major metropolis per year – this time it's Seattle – to slice and dice committed couples on Valentine's Day. It's a pretty decent gag that the two detectives assigned to the case are named Hobbs and Shaw, whom Ally and Jay instantly recognize as the Johnson/Statham frenemies of the Fast & the Furious series. (Compounding the gag is that F&F mainstay Jordana Brewster plays Shaw.) Even funnier, however, is that after Heart Eyes has targeted our unwilling lovers-to-be, the pair's first recourse isn't to flee or attack, but rather to reason with the psychopath, explaining, in increasingly panicked tones, that they can't be the next set of victims because he only butchers couples, and they're not a couple. Ally and Jay stress this even after they're caught an inch away from kissing, and the routine of their continued denial might be the most winning of the film's many clever conceits. Maybe our leads actually could have convinced the masked assassin to leave them alone if they genuinely weren't into each other – but we ain't buyin' it, and neither is Heart Eyes.
Ruben's outing owes a considerable debt to the Scream franchise, and it's unfortunate that the mystery behind the lunatic's identity is so ludicrous and unsatisfying. (Because the movie is severely under-populated, the reveal also isn't terribly unexpected.) And although the creative team's rom-com awareness is apparent, as evidenced by the Zumbado monologue in which she name-checks at least a dozen genre-classic titles in the span of 30 seconds, the execution doesn't always match the inspiration. I laughed out loud when I realized that the finale was going to involve Ally's frenzied rush to an airport, but beyond the welcome touch of her mistaking the back of a stranger's head for Jay's, the joke doesn't have much of a punchline. Still, Heart Eyes is appreciably smart, funny, gross, and, best of all, romantic, climaxing with the possibility of sequels yet refusing to deprive us of a deserved Happily Ever After. Its heart is in the right place … even if chunks of heart wind up all sorts of places.
If you were to guess which of the weekend's two bloody cinematic valentines would feature one of its leads slaying an adversary with a grimly uttered “Love hurts!”, it would be Love Hurts, right? That's the film's title, after all, and star Ke Huy Quan does indeed deliver that quip in the trailer's final seconds. Weirdly, however, while Olivia Holt blurts out “Love hurts!” at a critical juncture in Heart Eyes, the sentiment must've been deemed too on-the-nose for Love Hurts itself, because the line we hear in the preview somehow never made it into director Jonathan Eusebio's final cut. I'd say it was perhaps excised for time, but this blandly violent, forgettable trifle is only 83 minutes long – and besides, a Schwarzenegger-style comeback is in no way the only thing the movie is lacking.
Because Quan is so inherently likable, longtime stunt coordinator Eusebio's feature debut is easy to root for, even if it's among the more incoherently plotted 83 minutes I've sat through in ages. The narrative gist, fitting for a work by producers of Bob Odenkirk's 2021 action thriller Nobody, finds Quan's Marvin Gable a former hitman and martial-arts master now living a life of quiet contentment as a Wisconsin-based realtor. Much as his Oscar-winning role in Everything Everywhere All the Time did, Marvin allows Quan to take a deep dive into both obsequious-dweeb and agile-badass modes, and Love Hurts might've been fun if it just gave us a simple, elegant reason for the man's past to catch up with him. The one that screenwriters Matthew Murray, Josh Stoddard, and Luke Passmore provide, though, is so convoluted and bafflingly constructed that the film pretty much has to be all fights, all the time – the frequent combat is the only thing that make sense.
What kicks the story into motion is the unanticipated return of Ariana DeBose's Rose, a lawyer who skimmed money from Marvin's estranged gangster brother Knuckles (Daniel Wu). Rose, who's out for some vague kind of revenge, was long considered dead by the bad guys, and also by Marvin – which is strange, given that he's the guy who let Rose escape after Knuckles initially ordered him to kill her. (Marvin always had a little crush on the gal, don'tcha know.) By why, for starters, is everyone so shocked that Rose is back? It doesn't take long for us to learn that she's been openly bartending, apparently for quite a while, at a public watering hole in Milwaukee, where Marvin has been living for years. And when a pair of goons finally tracks down Rose's location, they find that she has an apartment – with her name printed on her lobby mailbox. So much for incognito. So much, too, for any hope that Love Hurts wouldn't devolve into sheer idiocy, with Marshawn Lynch and André Eriksen stuck playing unamusing bruiser foils, Rhys Darby (with farcically huge teeth) overacting to the rafters, and the charismatic Wu required to spend every scene – Every. Single. Scene. – sipping on a takeout bubble tea … because we wouldn't recognize him without one?
Not everything about this blessedly brief time-waster is a lost cause. Though his fight scenes are irrationally perfunctory considering his credits on The Fall Guy and a trio of John Wicks, Eusebio at least gives us the pleasure of routinely seeing full bodies in the frame (nicely emphasizing the agility of Quan and his stunt doubles), and he comes through with the occasional witty flourish; the POV from inside a rotating microwave-oven tray was especially cool. There's a left-field, oddly endearing romantic subplot for Lio Tipton, as Marvin's assistant, and Mustafa Shakir, as an unexpectedly poetic contract killer. And even this eternal non-fan of The Goonies smiled when former co-stars Quan and Sean Astin hugged it out, a 40-years-later reunion no less appealing for being aggressively sentimentalized. Yet all told, Love Hurts is too often a pain, particularly when the momentum dries up for moments of “romantic interest” between Quan and DeBose, who don't convince you that their characters even like each other, much less love each other. This is hardly a Cupid movie. It's just one that rhymes with “Cupid.”
I'M STILL HERE
No Oscar nomination this year was more unexpected than the Best Picture race's inclusion of I'm Still Here, director Walter Salles' Portuguese-language drama on the lingering effects of former congressman Rubens Paiva's forced disappearance and murder during Brazil's decades-long military dictatorship. No one appeared to think the inclusion was unworthy. It was simply that precisely zero prognosticators guessed that Sony Picture Classics' largely unseen international hit would be viewed by enough Academy members to land a spot, even if star Fernanda Torres' Golden Globes win ensured that more people would screen it. Well, the movie did get a Best Picture nod, and Torres made the Best Actress lineup, and Salles' latest is also a Best International Feature Film nominee … and having finally caught up with the title, I'm thrilled to say that it more than merits its recognition. Had there been another week of voting, it might've deservedly wound up in four or five additional categories, too.
With I'm Still Here opening in the Christmas season of 1970, the Paiva family we initially meet is a hearty, rambunctious bunch. Dad Rubens (Selton Mello), mom Eunice (Torres), and their brood of five spirited grade-to-high-school-aged children spend their days entertaining friends, lounging on the beaches of Rio de Janeiro, and staying happy and well-fed from dawn to dusk. It's only gradually that we're made aware of sinister forces encroaching: low-flying helicopters, battalions of soldiers in the streets, eldest Paiva daughter Vera (Valentina Herszage) and her friends getting stopped and frisked at a “routine” checkpoint. Even when shadowy figures show up at the Paivas' home and demand that Rubens accompany them to an unknown locale while other gun-carrying men stay behind, the clearly shaken Eunice doesn't leap to unpleasant conclusions; she maintains her politeness and offers them dinner (which they accept). But Rubens doesn't come home that day. Or the next day. And before long, it's Eunice and her teen daughter Eliana (Luiza Kosovski) who are taken in for questioning, neither of them knowing anything about Rubens' purported activism and Eunice, in particular, tormented and traumatized for the anti-government “crimes” her husband is accused of.
It's a harrowing tale achingly yet subtly told, and affecting largely because Salles and screenwriters Murilo Hauser and Heitor Lorega keep their focus on Eunice in a vice-like grip. We do witness how Rubens' disappearance affects his children, his friends, and the family's loyal housekeeper (Pri Helena). For true understanding of the situation's tragic scope, however, you need only look in Fernanda Torres' eyes. It's all there: the horror; the hope; the confusion; the rage; the pained awareness that Eunice has to put up a brave front for her kids and, should Rubens never return, provide for them without a current job and no access to the family bank account. (She needs her missing husband's signature to secure funds.) Running an age gamut from early 40s to late 60s, and an emotional gamut far more expansive, the 59-year-old Torres is almost unbearably sublime in I'm Still Here. If memory serves, Eunice only – and wholly understandably – blows her top on one occasion. The rest of the time, electricity is reserved to the active whirring of the woman's brain as she tries to fathom the unfathomable, and plan for the necessary next steps.
Speaking of memory, Sallas and his writers do a magnificent job of establishing the physical – photographs, home movies, household items – as keys to holding onto the ephemeral. Brazil's military dictatorship may be trying to gaslight Eunice (and untold numbers of others) into doubting their own memories, and may, in truth, be trying to remove proof of Rubens' very existence. But Eunice has all of these things to remind her that he was here, and he mattered, and that's why it makes so much emotional sense when, after decades, she receives Rubens' death certificate with utter joy, and when one of her children so laments the empty house when the Paiva clan is forced to move. In the absence of a person, their physical imprint is all that can be literally held onto.
I loved every inch of I'm Still Here, from Sallas' calmly measured, deliberately un-showy technique to the potent cameo for Torres' real-life mother (95-year-old Brazilian legend Fernanda Montenegro) to the distinctly rendered Paiva kids. When a title card reading “25 years later” popped on-screen, I instinctively welled up, knowing that we wouldn't be seeing the equally wondrous Herszage, Kosovski, Barbara Luz, Cora Mona, and Guilherme Silveira in those roles again, and immediately mourning their absence. Also, on a personal and somewhat bitchy note, I couldn't be happier that the film, in light of recent PR disasters for Emilia Pérez, might be the new front-runner for the International Feature Oscar. It's so gratifying, and a considerable relief, to now be able to root for a victory rather than against one.
