We should all be profoundly grateful that somebody saw Everything Everywhere All At Once with the takeaway that Ke Huy Quan deserved his own action movie vehicle. Even more grateful that the “somebody” were the geniuses at 87North, the ongoing standard-bearers of modern action cinema. But then came the trailer for Love Hurts, and a little red flag came up.

The trailer introduced us to Marvin Gable (Quan), a retired hitman happily settled into life as an unassuming civilian, reluctantly dragged back into the violent life he swore he’d never be part of again. It’s an endearing premise… or at least it was the first time we saw it. The problem is that we already saw this with John Wick and Nobody, not to mention Santa Claus as portrayed in Violent Night. There are arguments to be made that the protagonists for Kate and Bullet Train were reluctant killers in the same lane as well. Yes, the action scenes are all creative as hell, but it’s disappointing when these filmmakers keep using the same premise over and over.

Moreover, it’s worth pointing out that David Leitch and his usual team were only producers here. The film was directed by Jonathan Eusebio, here making his feature debut after coming up as a stunt coordinator for 87North. And the script was handled by the team of Matthew Murray, Josh Stoddard, and Luke Passmore, not a one of whom has previously written anything worth mentioning. Put simply, lack of experience is a prominent concern.

So I knew this film had the potential to be disappointing, but I didn’t think it could be “19 percent Tomatometer” bad. Still, the cast was good enough and the action scenes in the trailer were intriguing enough that I had to see what exactly happened here.

Long story short, what we got was yet another failed experiment in the ongoing effort to find a new direction post-Wick.

Yes, the fight scenes are all spectacular. I love how 87North keeps pushing the envelope in terms of stuntwork, camerawork, editing, and fight choreo, finding all manner of new means and reasons for stuntmen to beat the fuck out of each other. The problem we keep running into is that 87North doesn’t seem to be much good at anything else.

They can do all manner of action scenes. They can do dark brooding character drama. They can even do humor, if the joke is harsh enough and directed toward an unsympathetic character (as with Violent Night). But anytime they try to balance the action with romance or screwball comedy or anything lighter, it falls apart. They simply can’t square that circle. It brought down Bullet Train, it brought down The Fall Guy, and it freaking destroys Love Hurts.

See, Quan has no problem selling himself as the unassuming real estate agent and as the badass cutthroat. He can switch from one to the other on a dime, we all know this. Likewise, Ariana DeBose has the poise and charisma to sell herself as the female lead driving the plot forward as she runs circles around all the male characters. Individually, they’re perfectly cast. Together, the very notion of a Quan/DeBose romantic pairing is laughable on its face and void of any chemistry.

Likewise, Mustafa Shakir is a stone-cold scary motherfucker who steals damn near every scene he’s in. And I loved Lio (formerly Analeigh) Tipton as the comic relief secretary who’s perpetually single and hates Valentine’s Day with a passion. Again, each one is perfectly cast. Again, the two make no lick of goddamn sense as a romantic pairing. And when the two most prominent romantic pairings in a romcom are both so void of chemistry that they’re not cute or fun to watch together, that’s a fatal error. Critical mission failure.

Then again, it doesn’t help that the script isn’t giving anyone anything to work with. We’ve got flat stock characters, we’ve got too many themes and plotlines to juggle effectively, we’ve got hamfisted dialogue that falls flat on the floor, we’ve got a plot that’s at once so cliched and yet so convoluted that nobody has any reason to care what’s going on, and that’s not even getting started on the expository voice-over to literally and explicitly tell us exactly what the characters are thinking in the moment.

I haven’t seen a script this bad in ages. I’d call this “amateur hour”, but I’ve seen amateurs write better scripts than this. It somehow took three writers to put this script together, and all of them should be fucking embarrassed.

Love Hurts isn’t a movie, it’s a demo reel. It’s 20 minutes of fight scenes bundled with an hour of who-gives-a-shit. I don’t know if 87North will ever figure out how to make their style of action work with a lighter genre, but they sure as hell never will with these writers and this director. This is proof positive that Eusebio isn’t a filmmaker or a storyteller, he’s a fight coordinator (and a damn good one at that). And don’t even get me started on these hack screenwriters.

I weep to think of what this cast might’ve done with a crew that could tell a decent story. Such a damn shame they were the collateral damage of this failed action/romcom experiment. Hard pass.