Disppointment hurts too.

Love Hurts sees Ke Huy Quan follows up his Oscar win by throwing himself bodily into an already crowded genre, trading multiverse-hopping for hitman retirement with a clumsy and mismatched Valentine’s Day veneer.

Marvin Gable (Quan) is living a quietly satisfying life as a suburban realtor but his meticulously thoughtful life abruptly unravels when Rose Carlisle (Ariana DeBose), a former flame and partner-in-crime, reappears with dangerous unfinished business. She’s back to avenge herself on Marvin’s estranged brother Alvin “Knuckles” Gable (Daniel Wu), who sits atop a criminal empire and last spoke to his brother to order Rose’s death. Caught between his brother, his ex and a whole host of hitmen, Marvin’s open house is poised to turn into a total tear down.

While the ingredients are all there, Love Hurts never quite manages to stir them into something memorable. The film’s brief runtime leaves little room for meaningful character development, reducing Marvin and Rose to underwritten archetypes rather than fully realised people. Quan’s natural charm and impressive action chops make him an appealing lead, but the thin script does him no favours when it comes to selling the romantic angle. His chemistry with DeBose feels stilted, a casualty of a screenplay that never lets their connection breathe, mostly due to their spending most of the screen time apart.

While its brutal – if repetitive – fight scenes are nimbly executed, tonally Love Hurts, the film is much less surefooted. It veers wildly from whimsical rom-com moments to bursts of hyper-violent action but unlike, say, Nobody, it doesn’t manage to balance either of them, feeling disjointed and clumsily cut together.

Likewise its ensemble never really gels and in large sections suffers from the same thing that plagued 2016’s Ghostbusters where everyone in every scene is trying to steal the scene from every one else. Everyone’s driving their own shtick and everything ends up gridlocked and spinning their wheels without really moving things forward.

Quan’s Jackie-Chan like action moves are entertaining although the attempt to spin that one spectacular reveal gag from Everything Everywhere All At Once into a full-length feature utlimately falls short. There are occasional moments where everything clicks and Love Hurts shows us just what it could have been but it’s one of those rare films that’s actually far too short, and another twenty minutes or so of world building or character moments could have made all the difference. As it is, Love Hurts ends up more like Love Hearts – cute in concept but chalky and dry in execution.