Jonathan Eusebio understands how an unlikely fighter can be funny without stopping for a joke. His feature debut, Love Hurts, wastes that skill on a romance with too little feeling and a plot with too much explaining.
Fi1m perspective
In Love Hurts (2025), Ke Huy Quan plays Marvin Gable, an estate agent whose former profession was killing people. His mild manners make his resourcefulness in a fight funny, while Quan’s sincerity gives us a reason to care about the man doing the fighting. Eusebio draws an appealing performance from him but cannot give it a convincing love story. This is a disappointing feature debut, and even its 83 minutes leave too much time between the pleasures.
Eusebio reached feature directing through stunt performance, fight choreography and second-unit work, spending years alongside David Leitch and Chad Stahelski. His credits include fight choreography on John Wick (2014) and second-unit direction on Deadpool 2 (2018) and Birds of Prey (2020). Those are useful credentials for handling bodies in motion, but they do not establish who can sustain a whole film. Love Hurts makes that distinction uncomfortably clear.
His approach to action begins with the cast’s physical abilities and the characters they are playing. We enjoyed Quan’s fights because his quick movement and inventive use of weapons make Marvin’s resourcefulness amusing. Cinematographer Bridger Nielson keeps the physical work clear enough to appreciate, although the encounters rarely feel dangerous. There is room for both comedy and threat here, and Eusebio settles too readily for the former.
The trouble is what surrounds the fights. Criminal explanations repeatedly hold up Love Hurts, and the courtship offers little reason to care when the action stops. Quan supplies warmth, but the film seems to expect that warmth to make the romance persuasive by itself. Knowing how to keep a confrontation amusing has not yet translated into knowing how long to spend on people explaining themselves. If Eusebio returns to action romance, the first requirement is a couple worth watching before anyone picks up a weapon.
Biography
Jonathan Eusebio, also known as Jojo Eusebio, is a Canadian-born American director, stunt coordinator and fight choreographer. He made his feature directorial debut with the action comedy Love Hurts (2025).
Eusebio began working as a stunt performer in the late 1990s. A founding member of 87Eleven Action Design, his credits as stunt performer, fight choreographer or stunt coordinator include Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End (2007), 300 (2007), Iron Man 2 (2010), The Avengers (2012), John Wick (2014), Doctor Strange (2016), Black Panther (2018), John Wick: Chapter 2 (2017) and John Wick: Chapter 3 – Parabellum (2019). He has also served as second unit director on Deadpool 2 (2018), Birds of Prey (2020) and Violent Night (2022).
Born on 15 September 1973 in Canada to parents of Filipino heritage, Eusebio trained in martial arts and holds a degree from the University of California, Irvine.
