A kickless dud of an action comedy

 

Ariana DeBose's portrayal of Anita in West Side Story earned her an Oscar for best supporting actress in 2022.  Ke Huy Quan won an  Oscar for best supporting actor in 2023, playing a character who vaulted through multiple universes in Everything Everywhere All at Once.

   The two Oscar-winning actors are teamed in Love Hurts, a skimpy action comedy in which Quan gets most of the attention. Director Jonathan Eusebio lands a few bloody high shots (the view through a hole that has been blown in a man's head) but seldom connects when it comes to laughs.

    Love Hurts' major accomplishment involves brevity: It's 83 minutes long.

    The story begins with a cliched premise: Marvin Gable, a ludicrously joyful real estate agent, is drawn back into the assassin's life he believed he had abandoned.

     A poor excuse of a plot kicks off on Valentine's Day after Knuckles (Daniel Wu), Marvin's crime czar brother, tries to punish DeBose's character for taking mob money.

    Marvin, who once did his brother's bidding, had been ordered to kill DeBose's Rose. He didn't follow through. Now, she's back.

    Quan seems to be working way too hard. DeBose has too little to do, and the pair generates little by way of the rom-com chemistry that's supposed to provide heart.

    A gaggle of uninteresting thugs -- one played by Marshawn "Beastmode" Lynch -- doesn't add much either. 

   Some scenes simply don't pay off. Ashley (Lio Tipton) plays Gable's assistant at the real estate office. She falls for the brutal Raven (Mustafa Shakir), who wins her over with his sensitive, if unexpected, poetry. Sean Astin has a nice turn as Marvin's boss. 

   A duo of uninteresting thugs -- Marshawn "Beastmode" Lynch and André Eriksen-- doesn't add much either. 

   Might as well follow the movie's lead and keep things short. Cartoonish and forgettable, Love Hurts  proves a kick less dud.

Fun sours in formulaic 'Tomb Raider'

Alicia Vikander takes over the role of Lara Croft in a movie that can't resist formula.

“Shoot him, Lara. We can’t let him get to Himiko.”
If this line of dialogue from Tomb Raider doesn’t arouse ripples of excitement for you, you may not be a candidate for the latest attempt to turn a video game into something more than an over-amped funhouse of formulaic plotting and so-so effects.

When the line was uttered by one of the movie's characters, I couldn’t help wishing that the Bill Murray of the Ghostbusters era were around to add a wry and preposterous comment. Murray would have known what to say about Himiko, a departed Japanese queen also known as the Mother of Death. Open her tomb and the entire world will be doomed.

The main suspense about this edition: Can Alicia Vikander replace Angela Jolie as Lara Croft, the intrepid tomb raider? Small in stature but buffed to the max, Vikander put me in mind of a gym-obsessed Tinkerbell who's motivated by a mixture of iron-willed determination, preternatural leaping ability and a growing commitment to combat evil.

Early on, I thought Tomb Raider — which has been directed by Roar Uthaug, the Norwegian filmmaker who brought us The Wave -- might be fun. And it is -- until the movie reaches the island where the notorious, 2000-year-old Himiko has been entombed.

The movie opens in the UK where Uthaug stages a nifty bike chase through the streets of East London. An independent spirit, Lara refuses to inherit the Croft fortune. She'd rather work as a bicycle courier.

Too bad Lara is stuck with the Croft heritage. Lara's father Richard Croft (Dominic West) left home to find the mythic tomb in the Pacific. Lara grew up with a mentor (Kristen Scott Thomas). Scott Thomas doesn't have much to do in this edition but she looks as if someone dipped her in white powder, denying her even rudimentary hints of a complexion.

It has been seven years since Richard launched his island adventure. He is presumed dead.

After a few plot manipulations, Lara -- not one to accept conventional wisdom -- decides to retrace her father's steps in hopes of finding dear old Dad alive on the island.

To achieve her goal, Lara travels to Hong Kong where she hooks up with Lu Ren (Daniel Wu), the son of the captain who guided Richard to the island where some terrible -- but as yet unknown -- evil might be unearthed.

After raging seas wreck Lu's small boat, Lara and Lu are stranded on the island where they're taken prisoner by Mathias Vogel (Walton Goggins), a slave-driver who claims to have killed Lara’s dad. Vogel has been searching for the tomb of Queen Himiko ever since. It's roughly at this point that the movie's fun begins to sour.

I’m not sure whether Tomb Raider can match the popularity of the 2001 edition of Lara Croft: Tomb Raider although it’s probably better than the 2003 sequel, Lara Croft, The Cradle of Life.

Tomb Raider leaves little doubt that it's meant to function as an origins story, setting up what the filmmakers clearly hope will be a healthy franchise life.

We’ll see about that: In the meantime, know that Tomb Raider pits Lara against fiendish foes, a storm-tossed sea, a towering waterfall and other dangers which confront her as the script by Geneva Robertson-Dworet and Alastair Siddons goes through genre motions that ultimately can’t totally mask the story’s hollow origins.

In short: Uthaug and Vikander can’t make good on the promise of vibrant early scenes. By the end, enjoyment has been overrun by formula -- at least it was by me.