Review: 'Heart Eyes' is a movie Valentine built for shudders and cuddles
The first weeks of the new movie year have been good for chills and thrills -- shoutout to "Companion," "Presence," and now "Heart Eyes," exclusively in theaters and the perfect twisted date movie for your favorite Valentine who isn't adverse to screaming bloody murder.
Scream you will at this cheeky romcom scarefest about an assassin, aka the "Heart Eyes killer," since he wears a cupid mask and strikes only once a year on Feb. 14 and only against couples truly in love. HEK, as the media tags the killer, travels from city to city like Santa on a murder spree. Is the villain also nursing a broken heart? I'll never tell.
"Heart Eyes" owes a lot to the original "Scream" in 1996 for building a blueprint for mirth and menace. It's a gift that keeps on giving. Credit director Josh Ruben ("Werewolves Within") for tweaking the formula in fresh and fiercely funny ways. Ruben's film should be subtitled "That's So Meta," so pervasive is the movie's habit of commenting on itself.
Of course, Ruben needs hot young talent to pull off his sleight of hand. And boy does he luck out with Olivia Holt and Mason Gooding, oozing charm as HEK's new targets. Both Ally (Holt) and Jay (Gooding) work at the same ad agency for a lady boss from hell (Michaela Watkins).
But that's about all they have in common. The sexy smooch they share one night at a restaurant is meant to get Ally's ex boyfriend jealous. Instead, it captures the lethal attention of Heart Eyes, who mistakes the fake liplock for the real thing and who suddenly shows up in Ally's closet.
As so we're off. Enter the cops on the case. They're called Hobbs and Shaw, after the characters played by Dwayne Johnson and Jason Statham in the "Fast & Furious" spinoff. These are the jokes, folks, but actors Devon Sawa and Jordana Brewster are nothing like their namesakes.
As detectives, Hobbs and Shaw stupidly arrest Jay as the killer -- what! -- an accusation that's not going to fly, although they're right about the sparks being real between Jay and Ally. You knew that, right? Holt and Gooding really do have a chemistry that's electric.
I'd like to say that "Heart Eyes" ends in high, whodunit style. But its actually more like a meh. The getting there really is half the fun. The banter is quite clever, especially when Ally's bestie (a scene-stealing Gigi Zumbado) rolls out a stream of romcom titles in one hilarious breath.
Ruben goes a bridge too far by including a scene from the 1940 screwball comedy classic "His Girl Friday," proving that comparisons are indeed odious when you really can't compete.
The same goes for the suspense shoutouts. Ally's death-defying scene on a runaway carousel recalls Alfred Hitchcock's 1951 landmark "Strangers on a Train," to which it can't hold even a flickering candle. Ruben knows his film history, but rank copycatting gets him nowhere.
For all its imperfections and borrowed inspirations, "Heart Eyes" still delivers the goods as heart-racing fright night escapism. "No couple is safe," the film's sassy ad campaign teases. For lovers in search of a movie Valentine built for shudders and cuddles, this one's a keeper.
