‘Love Hurts’ Review: Oscar Winner Ke Huy Quan Gets His First Starring Role, and It’s Woefully Underwritten

variety.com:

Peter Debruge Chief Film Critic Ke Huy Quan has had a weird career. He made two widely seen studio hits as a child, endearing himself to a generation as Short Round in “Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom” and Data in “The Goonies.” Then he disappeared for a couple of decades, eventually resurfacing in “Everything Everywhere All at Once.” The Academy so loved Quan’s comeback, they gave him an Oscar, but it hasn’t been easy finding a big-screen follow-up for an actor who’s beloved by all, but severely limited in his range.

In “Love Hurts,” Quan gets a welcome chance to stretch, playing two polar-opposite personae: Everyone in Milwaukee thinks Marvin Gable is a nice-guy Realtor, when in fact, he’s an ex-hitman who switched jobs after being ordered to snuff the love of his life, Rose (another Oscar winner, Ariana DeBose).

In his old line of work, eliminating folks for money-laundering brother Knuckles (Daniel Wu), Marvin could kill without question.

Now, he bakes heart-shaped cookies and serves them to his clients. While Quan isn’t especially convincing in either extreme, it’s refreshing to see him treated as a bona fide movie star — a corrective to the broken-English “pidgin” hole Hollywood put him in as a kid.