Film Review Double Feature: "Love Hurts" and "The Gorge"
Though both generic hybrids, only "The Gorge" ever really manages to be both coherent and entertaining.
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Warning: Full spoilers for the films follow.
For this week’s double feature, I take a look at Love Hurts and The Gorge. Though both genre hybrids, only the latter really manages to make use of its star power and its production values to tell a coherent story that, at its best, is quite entertaining and probably deserving of a big-screen release.
I went into Love Hurts with very low expectations, given its truly abysmal Rotten Tomatoes score and poor word of mouth and, I’m sad to say, those expectations were essentially met. I didn’t hate the film, necessarily, but I definitely didn’t feel my hour and twenty three minutes had been rewarded. There were bright spots–both Ke Huy Quan and Ariana DeBose are reliably charismatic–but the film fails on almost every other level.
When the film begins Quan’s Marvin Gable is a successful realtor. However, the return of DeBose’s Rose, who was a lawyer serving Gable’s cutthroat brother, Alvin “Knuckles” Gable (Daniel Wu), turns his life upside down. Very quickly, he’s drawn back into the perilous world that he thought he’d left behind. While his brother tries to ensnare him and make him a hitman again, Marvin also has to contend with his love for Rose and stay alive.
Narratively, the film is all over the place. One gets the sense that there was a lot that was left on the cutting room floor (perhaps because the studio didn’t have any faith the film was going to do good business so wanted to cut their losses). In its place, we get a hamfisted voiceover from Gable that desperately attempts to imbue the proceedings with some sort of storytelling coherence. I wish someone would tell Hollywood that a voiceover is not a good substitute for strong storytelling, and that no matter how telling rather than showing is going to make an incoherent narrative any more coherent or explicable. None of the narrative beats ever quite land in this movie: not the romance between Rose and Marvin (we’re told that there’s chemistry there, but Rose is on-screen for far too little time for this to land), not Knuckles’ sadism and sudden outbursts of violence; and not the efforts of Knuckles’ various toughs to bludgeon Marvin into obedience.
Even all of this I could have forgiven, had the film even managed to have any action set-pieces that were anything resembling exciting. However, they all proceed with a sort of strange rhythm that never quite gains any momentum (mostly because they’re bogged down by the film’s clumsy attempts at humor). The whole time I was watching them I kept thinking about John Wick, and how the various films in that franchise are enjoyable precisely because their fight scenes were like watching expertly-executed choreography.
More distressing in this regard are those moments when, for some reason, we’re treated to moments of gruesome violence, such as when Knuckles plunges a straw into a man’s eye (the man in question, played by Sean Astin, is Marvin’s loving and affable boss). In a film in which these kinds of bloody moments are part and parcel of the action, this would make sense. When they seem to come out of nowhere–and when they seem to be designed to simply gross us out–they feel like they’re teleported in from a different, and perhaps far more adventurous and interesting, movie.
The thing that frustrates me the most about this movie is the fact that it could have been quite entertaining and even good, if so much of it hadn’t clearly been cut out before it saw the light of day. There are glimmers here and there of a really quite funny, sexy, and action-packed comedy of the type that were all the rage in the 1980s and 1990s. When it comes right down to it, however, an hour and twenty-odd minutes is simply not enough time to tell a fully-developed story, and though I was glad the film didn’t outstay its welcome, I could have wished for something much better.
Exacerbating this is the fact that this is a swing and a miss for both Quan and DeBose, both of whom I dearly love as performers and who sometimes struggle to get material that is worthy of their considerable talents. We all know how Hollywood works: if you’re given a vehicle of your own and it flops, it’s always that much more difficult to get another big gig. This is all the more true when you’re a person of color.
So, in sum, I think that Love Hurts is a bust in almost every way. While it deserves at least some praise for not wearing out its welcome, I’d be hesitant that anyone give up even an hour of their time to see it. It really should have been sent to streaming and then quickly forgotten about but, alas, it got a theatrical release, which means its failure is even more obvious to everyone.
Speaking of streaming, let’s move on to The Gorge.
The film stars Miles Teller and Anya Taylor-Joy as Levi Kane and Drasa, a pair of sharpshooters from America and Lithuania who are enlisted to stand guard over a mysterious gorge (on opposite sides, of course) and charged with keeping the sinister creatures that live inside it from getting out. They very soon begin a little romance, first communicating via writing, but Levi eventually manages to get across the gorge and things really begin to kick into high gear. However, it all goes sideways when he plunges into the gorge, Drasa goes in after him. It soon becomes clear that something quite sinister is afoot, something vaster and more horrifying than either of them could have imagined. This chasm isn’t, in fact, a portal into Hell–which obviously would be a terrible thing in itself– but is instead a former site where the Allies were developing a mysterious toxin. After they were exposed to it during an earthquake, they began to mutate, kept prisoner in their former testing site and periodically examined by a corporation called Darklake, who wants to use the toxin to create super soldiers. Levi and Drasa manage to escape and, in the process, destroy the Darklake agents who were going to kill them.
As this synopsis summary makes clear, The Gorge is a blend of romance, sci-fi, and horror, and there’s no question that Teller and Taylor-Joy are a pleasure to watch. Their chemistry may not be electric, but it’s serviceable, and they’re both such strong performers on their own that you find yourself liking them. They’re just two lonely souls trying to do their best with an undeniable assignment, heedless of the fact that they are just pawns and that they are being lied to about everything.
If the film’s overall plot sounds more than a little familiar, it should. This is essentially the plot of Alex Garland’s Annihilation, in my opinion one of the director’s very best films and one of the most haunting movies of 2018. I’ll admit that at first I was a bit on the fence about the revelation that the residents of the Gorge are mutated scientists and soldiers, but the more I thought about it, the more it became an even more unsettling plot twist than if the gorge had actually been a portal to Hell. While being stranded in Hell would be bad in and of itself, there’s something even more upsetting about the idea that these poor souls have been abandoned by everyone, including the governments that sent them there in the first place.
I must admit that I found the reveal to be a bit hamfisted, and it’s another of those moments where the film betrays its debt to Annihilation without ever really capturing what made Garland’s film so stunning. I will say, though, that the creature design is unsettling, particularly once we learn that these are people, even if they aren’t human in the way the main characters might recognize. The fact that some of the creatures–who have been dubbed Hollow Men, after the T.S. Eliot poem–have been there since the 1940s makes their appearance all that much more horrifying and tragic. If anything, I would have liked to see even more of them, since they’re mostly just cannon-fodder.
What really surprised me, however, was the politics of this film. Obviously The Gorge was in production long before Donald Trump became president again and Elon Musk demonstrated how terrible it is when unelected private citizens with a lot of money and power start meddling in things they barely understand. However, it’s impossible to look at Sigourney Weaver’s character–named Bartholomew, she’s the Darklake leader who enlists Kane and then tries to destroy him once he finds out too much–and not see a cautionary tale about what happens when corporate greed starts to overtake everything else: government accountability, human morality, basic decency. This is a woman who is more than happy to kill a young man just because he found out her secret and, though her demise might be a bit rushed, it is nevertheless a little cathartic to see such an amoral character brought down by the very system that these people have put into place in order to ensure that the tortured residents of the Gorge never manage to get free.
Though many critics found the film’s mixture of genres off putting or not particularly effective, I think it works well enough. I mean sure, the ending–which sees the lovers united at some little cafe in France–might be a little cliche, but it’s also fun and a nice reward for the horrors that they’ve experienced while doing their job on the very edges of a terrifying expanse filled with tormented souls. There are worse things than giving the heroes of a horror film their own little happy ending. It’s just a shame the film got bumped to streaming, because it would certainly have made the most out of a big screen. Alas, such are the economics of our time.