A pitiful action-comedy that stubbornly fails to entertain, Love Hurts is a Valentine’s Day–themed disaster getting drubbed at the box office.

Poor Ke Huy Quan, Best Supporting Actor Oscar winner for Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022), claims he turned down the lead role in Love Hurts twice before Steven Spielberg advised him, “Ke, you should do this. It’s great.”

So this is all Steven Spielberg’s fault.

The script by Matthew Murray, Josh Stoddard, and Luke Passmore, and the direction by newcomer and ex-stunt coordinator Jonathan Eusebio, (John Wick, Black Panther) are so weak that the resulting film probably wouldn’t have worked for anybody. It may be time to stop bankrolling stuntmen-turned-directors, a strategy based almost entirely on the wild success of the John Wick franchise. David Leitch, who codirected John Wick, is a producer on Love Hurts.  

Unlike the Wick franchise, which became famous for inventive, thrilling, and often hilarious action sequences, Love Hurts’ fight scenes look heavily coordinated and rehearsed. The film’s leaden shooting and editing style are a big part of the problem. I’ve rarely seen a film with such obvious pacing problems — it just limps along. If you’ve seen the preview for Love Hurts, you recognize at once that the marketing team’s editor had a much better sense of how to amp up this material, making the one-liners seem funny and the action scenes pop.

Another big problem is that Quan is plainly too old for the role of Marvin Gable, an amiable, fussy, and highly successful Milwaukee realtor who turns out be an ex-hit man in hiding.

Quan looks every day of his fifty-three years, especially when paired with thirty-four-year-old Ariana DeBose (West Side Story) as his love interest. She’s playing Rose, a tough, savvy former employee of Marvin’s brother, Knuckles (Daniel Wu), a vengeful crime lord who’s after both Marvin and her for what he sees as their rank betrayals. Rose and Marvin have both been on the lam or living under assumed names. But now she’s determined to come out in the open and fight Knuckles because, as she keeps saying, “hiding ain’t living.”

She’s also determined to drag Marvin out of the beige world of real estate, which in his case seems to function like a cult. He’s hypnotized by the banal rhythms of showing and selling suburban houses with slick, soulless “eat pray love” decor to affluent couples and small families — baking heart-shaped cookies, chopping matching creases into rows of sofa pillows, and endlessly chirping the company catchphrase, “I want a home for you.”

Two of Knuckles’ henchmen, King and Otis, are played by Marshawn Lynch and André Eriksen. They’re clearly modeled on the type of violent but darkly funny characters that we recognize from Coen brothers and Quentin Tarantino films, though the types go back to 1940s film noir. These characters have become so recognizable and beloved, viewers generally respond with automatic pleasure to their presence in a film. Anora, for example, has a wonderful trio of Armenian and Russian fixers and “muscle” who hilariously bungle their Russian oligarch boss’ seemingly easy assignment, arguing haplessly among themselves all the way.

If they’re the gold standard for such characters in this past year, Love Hurts represents the bottom of the barrel, with the usually funny Lynch and the not-funny-at-all Eriksen trying to breathe life into stale lines and business. A third henchman, the Raven (Mustafa Shakir) is a blade-wielding killer with a softer side that he expresses in written poetry. He unexpectedly forms a romantic bond with Marvin’s disaffected office assistant Ashley (Lio Tipton) over his emo blank verse.

This plotting is all so strenuous yet ineffectual, it seems only the fight scenes might save the movie as a piece of entertainment. But sadly, even with the best will in the world, Quan isn’t up to the job of bringing Jackie Chan–style comedic martial arts to bear against old foes who are coming after him. Quan’s childhood training in martial arts and his experiences as a Hong Kong action film choreographer in the years after his stint as a child actor in Hollywood enabled him to do the film’s fight scenes, after a fashion. But he’s so frail-looking as a “spider-monkey-ninja-god” going up against gigantic goons that even audience faith in the idea that great technique can win out over brute strength — a staple of Hong Kong action films — strains credulity.

Though there’s one not-bad idea for an improvised Jackie Chan–style weapon. Marvin wields his prized possession, his “Regional Realtor of the Year” award, in order to fight off Knuckles’ thugs. In an earlier scene, we see Sean Astin —  Quan’s old Goonies costar — playing Marvin’s kindly, Stetson-wearing boss who gave him the award.

But that realtor award is a slight, melancholy wisp of a nice touch in the midst of wholesale failure. This is the kind of film that leans on dumb stunt cameo appearances as flaccid gags for those in the know. In this case, in addition to Sean Astin, there’s Drew Scott of the home renovation show Property Brothers playing Marvin’s arch-rival in the real estate game.

If all that weren’t hollow enough, Love Hurts features a musical soundtrack so generic it’s painful to the ear. Nothing announces a limited budget combined with a ghastly lack of imagination like this kind of score, in which every scene sounds vaguely like a thousand other movies in the same genre, but not exactly like any one of them because that would require specificity.

Needless to say, you should shun this movie. Valentine’s Day is a stupid fake holiday already, plenty hokey and depressing enough without adding Love Hurts to the general mid-February malaise.