Don Draper may be the handsome mystery at the center of Mad Men, the AMC series that's become a cultural icon. But as the series begins its fourth season on Sunday, it's about time the most captivating characters got their due, and they aren't the ones smoking in skinny-cut suits.
Betty Draper, the pretty housewife. Joan Holloway (now Harris), the sexy secretary. Peggy Olsen, the career girl. In the wrong hands, these characters could have become stale cliches, but in the hands of show creator (and Sopranos vet) Matthew Weiner and talented actors, the women of Mad Men are in many ways more interesting than the men.
As season four begins, spoilers are scarce. It's now 1964. The ad men of note — Don, Roger Pete, etc. have struck out with their own agency, rebuilding their success from the ground up.
Betty Draper has divorced Don and remarried Henry, though it remains to be seen if she has escaped her gilded cage or just moved to where the grass looks greener.
Peggy is gaining confidence in her professional life, and Joan is back in the office after her ticket out — a successful husband — turned out to be more ephemeral than she imagined.
I don't want to short-change the men, who struggle with finding their footing in a world that keeps changing around them. But learning that Weiner's writer's room is stocked with mostly women makes it clear why the women in this show are both so complex and so captivating.
Don Draper will still sizzle and seduce, but on Sunday I'll be watching for the girls.
Career revivals like the one that has happened to Ke Huy Quan are extremely rare in Hollywood. As a child, he scored two big back-to-back roles in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom and The Goonies. While he found occasional work after that, his career mostly went dormant starting in 2002 until he was cast in Everything Everywhere All at Once, a role that won him an Oscar.
Now, he’s the toast of the town, including his first-ever starring role as the lead in Love Hurts. Quan plays Marvin Gable, a relentlessly positive real estate agent who’s the top seller in his area. But from the beginning of the film, it’s clear that he has a hidden backstory, as he receives a veiled threat in a note from a woman named Rose (Ariana DeBose), who is seen early on defacing many of his advertisements around town.
When a heavy called The Raven (Mustafa Shakir) confronts Marvin at his office, he is pulled back into his old life, one where he was involved in the criminal enterprise of his brother, Knuckles (Daniel Wu). Soon he’s dodging attacks on multiple fronts, looking out for Rose, and all the while trying to keep up appearances at his day job.
Directed by Jonathan Eusebio (a stunt coordinator making his directorial debut) and written by Matthew Murray, Josh Stoddard, and Luke Passmore, the film is one big excuse to have Quan show off the martial arts skills he demonstrated in his Oscar-winning role. While there is some semblance of a story, it’s mostly to set up the various fight scenes; there’s little attempt to make the audience care about any of the stakes.
Instead, Eusebio and his team vacillate between moments of calmness and sequences with extreme violence. Quan and his fellow combatants (in addition to Shakir, he faces off against Marshawn Lynch, Cam Gigandet, and others) engage in a series of creative moves designed to inflict as much pain as possible. The juxtaposition of the seemingly mild-mannered Marvin with his abilities works relatively well, as does the variety of implements used as weapons (pencils, boba straws, feathers, and more come into play over the course of the film).
But the lack of a full story catches up with the film in the end, as instead of building to some kind of grand finale, there are diminishing returns with every scene. The filmmakers try to distract with a semi-amusing romantic connection between The Raven and Marvin’s assistant, Ashley (Lio Tipton), something that works much better than allusions to a bond between Marvin and Rose. There’s also a mini-Goonies reunion with Sean Astin as Marvin’s boss that’s kind of fun, but the antipathy between Marvin and his attackers never fully develops.
Quan is a joyful presence who does his level best to make himself into a lead actor, but he’s not served well in the film as a whole. DeBose, an Oscar winner herself, seems to be stuck in a rut of mediocre roles, ones that don’t allow her to show off her skills like West Side Story. Lynch shows again he’s reliable in comic sidekick roles, while Tipton and Shakir are the only other actors to make any kind of impact.
The Valentine’s theme of Love Hurts is not the only part of the film that feels tacked on. While the idea of letting Quan show off his skills is a good one in theory, very little thought appears to have been put into making that showcase effective. The result is a forgettable action comedy that puts more emphasis on ultraviolence than its story.