Review of Love Hard (2021) by Gentlegiant1972 — 03 Jan 2022

I watched Love Hard on January 2 while having a pretty bad day after enjoying some magic salad. Visually this movie is fine - the shot selection, composition, lighting - it's all adequate. The performances are good enough to keep your attention and Harry Shum Jr. playing the more successful narcissistic younger brother was a standout for me. The screenplay itself, though, is terrible. It has literally every cliche you could imagine, the jokes rarely land, the characters are meh and I'm not sure there is a single original idea in this film. There's also a lot of voice lines that were clearly added awkwardly in post to fix plot holes or make plot points more obvious. The abysmal screenplay combined with the fact that the references that felt targeted at me specifically and the fact the soundtrack seemed like it was stolen from my playlist was honestly kind of alienating. It felt like watching an algorithmically generated movie targeted at me specifically. Or at least nerdy, non-white males born between 1990 and 1999 that like Die Hard and used to listen to Wolfmother.

The terrible screenplay and oddly personal references sprinkled throughout this combined with my emotional state made Love Hard fill me with an almost eldritch horror. This movie was transcendentally bad. The effects of the magic salad and terribleness of the screenplay short circuited my brain and made for a trippier experience than Enter the Void. The experience of watching it was akin to the DMT fueled hallucinations I expect to experience as I shuffle off this mortal coil. Some movies feel like watching a car crash. Love Hard felt like being in a car crash - time slowed and every detail seemed hyper real. I have not seen the face of God but I can only assume the experience is akin to what I went through. Annoyingly, despite all its phoniness this movie still managed to elicit an emotional response from me, but it was completely unearned. Love Hard is like emotional McDonalds. It makes your brain produce all the chemicals that eating delicious food does but part of you will always know that it's actually slowly poisoning you. I don't regret watching this, but that has more to do with the fact that this movie was so bad it made me experience ego death, and I suspect most people that watch this movie won't have that experience. As a movie, I give love hard a 3/10, as a trigger for unlocking new planes of consciousness I did not previously know existed it gets a 9/10.