Love Hurts

Regardless of whether you buy into the titular sentiment. Love Hurts doesn’t offer much of a remedy. Blending elements of seasonal romantic comedy, bloody revenge saga, and noir-infused mystery of mistaken identity, it feels derivative from start to finish.

More silly than substantial, this admirable attempt by Oscar-winning actor Ke Huy Quan (Everything Everywhere All at Once) to showcase his leading-man potential instead saddles him with an uninspired and wildly unfocused script.

Quan plays Marvin Gable, a charismatic suburban Milwaukee realtor so unassuming, so nerdy, so kind and generous, and so genuinely happy with his job that you’d never suspect him of possessing action-hero credentials or harboring dark secrets from his past.

He’s done his best to conceal all of that from his employees. After all, he gets only mildly peeved when his open-house yard signs are vandalized. But when a menacing figure known as the Raven (Mustafa Shakir) shows up at his office, Marvin suspects the worst.

It turns out that before he started this new life, Marvin was a hitman working in organized crime for his brother, nicknamed Knuckles (Daniel Wu), who still owes a lot of money to some Russians. And he sent the Raven from his army of hapless henchmen to track down Rose (Ariana DeBose), Marvin’s wily and alluring former partner who has emerged from hiding after being suspected dead.

Meanwhile, Marvin’s superfluous narration is delivered with sledgehammer subtlety. “I allowed my brother to turn me into somebody I never wanted to be,” he explains in what passes for a moment of self-reflection.

The film features some scattered laughs but generates few thrills from its parade of cartoonish confrontations without any character depth or narrative coherence to bridge them.

The directorial debut of stunt coordinator Jonathan Eusebio (John Wick) spotlights some capable fight choreography but seems more interested in flooding every set piece with bone-crunching sound effects than being fresh or spontaneous — aside from a dynamic 1-on-2 showdown involving kitchen appliances.

The result is so over-the-top, and the dialogue so wooden, at every turn that it lacks any realistic grounding to generate even the slightest rooting interest in Marvin’s underlying search for happiness. For him and for moviegoers, Love Hurts only inflicts more pain.

Rated R, 83 minutes.