French actor turned director Gilles Lellouche’s third feature also stars François Civil and Vincent Lacoste.

If you took Magnolia, Goodfellas, Boyz n the Hood and perhaps Claude Lelouch’s A Man and a Woman, plugged them all into the latest version of ChatGPT and asked it to spit out a brand new film, you could wind up with something like Gilles Lellouche’s (no relation to Claude) swooning French crime romance, Beating Hearts (L’Amour ouf).

Sink or Swim was a major hit in France that grossed $40 million, granting Lellouche carte blanche to do whatever he wanted domestically, and with a budget nearly equal to what his last film made. You have to give him credit for trying hard, though the problem is he actually tries way too hard. Watching his decade-spanning saga of violent crime and amour fou is like having Lellouche repeatedly punch you in the face while he keeps shouting: Don’t you see how fou this amour really is? Don’t you??

That track is not only heard in full but featured in a choreographed dance number — you can toss West Side Story into the AI generator as well — where the two teens fall head-over-heels for each other after first meeting outside of middle school. Both hail from modest families, though they seem to be worlds apart: Clotaire (Malik Frikah) is a hot-headed thug who gets into fights that Lellouche stages like veritable MMA combats. Jaqueline, aka Jackie (Mallory Wanecque), is a smart but rebellious girl who’s being raised by a thoughtful dad (Alain Chabat) after her mother was killed in a car crash.

It doesn’t take long for their two young hearts to leap into action — and if you didn’t get that then don’t worry, the director inserts a shot where a wad of old bubble gum starts beating like a real heart.

Their budding relationship, however passionate, will be short-lived. Because he’s such a badass, and one who seems to lack basic human logic, Clotaire gets caught up with a local criminal (Benoît Poelvoorde) specializing in armed robbery and karaoke of old French ballads — because, why not? Soon enough he’s become an integral part of a gang that attacks the same port facility where his father (Karim Leklou) works, resulting in the death of an armored car driver that Clotaire takes the blame for.

Cut to a decade later. The heartbroken Jackie (Adèle Exarchopoulos) has never gotten over what happened, flunking school and now working a day job at a rental car place. It’s there that she meets her company’s midlevel manager, Jeffrey (Vincent Lacoste), who dismisses her for being obnoxious, but then falls for her afterwards when she strips down to her undies on a rain-soaked street, throwing her uniform in his face.

Jeffrey is a caricature of the French yuppie class, dressed in white polos and obsessed with modern conveniences and corporate success. It’s the most thankless role the charming Lacoste (Sorry Angel) has ever played — and just wait till you see what winds up happening to Jeffrey.

But Clotaire and Jackie also come across as caricatures of the French working-class, unable to control themselves or their emotions because that’s apparently what working-class kids are like. Lellouche divides the world into stereotypes that he amplifies in nearly every scene, as if the drama will somehow be believable if everyone screams their lungs out.