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"Love Hurts" is yet another helping of Valentine's Day product that doesn't put enough new comic spin on its purported subject. It's essentially an action flick intended to turn its star, Ke Huy Quan, into a full-fledged romantic lead. Anyone who remembers Quan as the fast-talking Short Round ("Hold on to your potatoes!") in Steven Spielberg's 1984 "Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom," and as Data in 1985's "The Goonies," has surely been rooting for this guy ever since he ended a long Hollywood hiatus to feature in the deliriously over-cranked 2022 hit "Everything Everywhere All at Once," for which he won an Oscar.

Happily, Quan is still an amiable performer, with an undimmed sparkle in his eyes. Here he plays a Milwaukee real estate agent named Marvin Gable, who we are asked to believe was once an assassin in the employ of his mobster brother, Knuckles (Daniel Wu). Marvin thinks he's put that life behind him, but when he gets an unexpected valentine from an old colleague named Rose (Ariana DeBose of Spielberg's "West Side Story" remake), he finds himself being sucked back into the life. Rose stole a couple million dollars from Knuckles back in the day, and Knuckles, as you might expect, is a man who holds a grudge.

None of this is plausible, of course, and the movie's lack of romantic heat doesn't help. (DeBose's character isn't an old girlfriend of Marvin's -- although he wishes she had been -- so while there's some light flirty stuff going on, their story is hardly compelling.) What we mainly get is a lot of martial arts mayhem, with comical thugs leaping and kicking and flying through the air -- the sort of thing that's so familiar by now we could probably pull it off ourselves. (Oddly, director Jonathan Eusebio, making his first feature, also worked on fight choreography for three of the "John Wick" movies, which stage this kind of mano-a-mano uproar in a more electrifying manner.)

There are a number of ancillary gangsters passing through the story, but only one of them is given much to do. His handle is The Raven (Mustafa Shakir), and he has a quiet, silly scene with Marvin's office manager (Lio Tipton), in which he reads her some of the poetry he writes in his spare, non-murdering moments. ("No one ever understood my words before," he tells her.) We also meet Marvin's good-hearted boss, who's played, in a brief, affecting scene, by Quan's old "Goonies" costar Sean Astin. As for Quan himself, a butt-kicking martial arts guy going back to his "Temple of Doom" days, he carries a fair share of the slam-bang action (not that we can always tell, since the careful editing suggests the presence of wily stunt people). But as personable as he is, he has limited range as an actor, and he strains to hold the picture together. Whether anyone could is a fair question.

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To find out more about Kurt Loder and read features by other Creators writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators website at www.creators.com.

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