Love Hurts plays like a misfiring Valentine. It has plenty of reliable ingredients for a film that could have been equal parts bruised-arm action, absurd-suburb comedy, and dangerous romance. But none of it comes together in this picture that spends more time talking about love than ever showing it. If only this film put as much thought into its script as it did for ways to brutalize with cookie cutters and straws.

Ke Huy Quan’s resurgence deserves something better than what this film struggles to do with him. He plays Marvin, an eccentric and passionate realtor whose true love seems to be his job. He’s so devoted that even his depressed assistant (Lio Tipton) can’t bring down his spirit on Valentine’s Day. But his criminal past comes back to haunt him when his estranged crush Rose (Ariana DeBose) announces her return through taunting valentines. This signal attracts the attention of Marvin’s crime-boss brother Knuckles (Daniel Wu), a villain whose only notable trait is his favorite tea (it’s bubble, sorry for the spoiler). Thrust back into a world of fighting hitmen, Marvin must fight off his aggressors to preserve his favorable realtor lifestyle and maybe fall back in love with Rose.

This seems like a plot that should write itself, as though the comedy will come naturally when the punches start flying. The mixture doesn’t work, however, because there’s so little character chemistry to care about who will win in battles of guns, knives, and oversized silverware. I’m sure the cuteness of Quan might be enough to warrant a rooting, but that’s by default for the actor and autopilot for the character. The feud between Marvin and Knuckles is never explored all that much, kept tight-lipped and reduced to platitudes of family and never leaving the world of crime.

One would think that given the title and holiday that it’d be exciting to see Marvin and Rose rekindle their romance, but…what romance? We do get a flashback of Marvin sparing Rose’s life, but there’s not much love between them aside from declarations, most of which are made in their own heads. There is no romantic chemistry between these two characters that their big kiss arrives way too little way too late. It’s almost baffling how Marvin ultimately declares his love for Rose by the film’s end because nothing else in the film ever makes that clear. If love hurts, this film avoids nearly every punch it can deliver.

The rest of the film is a whole lot of nothing outside of Quan flexing through choreographed fights. There’s several subplots of hitmen either falling in love or working on relationships that are never as enduring or silly as the film wants them to be. There’s a more intricate plot involving Rose swiping money, what happened to that money, what greater criminal forces want that money, and, more importantly, who cares enough to keep track of this web, because the movie sure doesn’t explore it. The characters tossed into mess are so bland that the inclusion of Sean Astin has him playing a character who outright recognizes he’s going to be killed off, relating to the joke of all of Astin’s characters dying. As with nearly every idea in this film, there’s almost a good joke there. Even the comical inclusion of Rhys Darby is so underutilized that the only thing funny about this captured hitman is his missing teeth.

What hurts the most is that Love Hurts doesn’t work with all its prowess. Sure, there are some decently violent fights, with Quan getting tossed across kitchens and contending with one assassasin wielding an absurd amount of blades. But the plot fluctuates between a tedius crime plot and boring tropes of being haunted by a past we don’t see much of. But the worst aspect is the absolutely tepid attempt to weave romance into the equation. Every attempt at romance is forced and every potential for sexual chemistry is dashed before it has a chance. The few passages about love in this film are so corny and dull that it wouldn’t surprise me if they were ripped straight from a greeting card or collection of candy hearts. As hard as it tries, this is a film that doesn’t have enough fights to overlook its tired stagging and hardly-there romance. It is, as one hitmen describes his wife’s relationship issues, “emotionally constipated.”