With the help of romantic comedies, modern dating rituals have evolved from shared milkshakes and chaste goodnight kisses into ever more elaborate, quirky, and frequently inexplicable shows of affection. Take Monet Mazur and Carmine Giovinazzo, the feather-brained L.A. couple in writer-director Eric Schwab's sub-Cinemax thriller The Learning Curve. After an adorable meet-cute in which Giovinazzo rescues Mazur from sexual assault in the park and then shakes down her attacker for a cool $500, the pair head off to a local taco stand to spend a small portion of the proceeds. Plates in hand, they stroll over to a nearby trampoline, where Giovinazzo introduces Mazur to the art of taco-jumping, a skill that involves consuming an entire taco in the midst of a front flip. The trick, he tells her, is to keep the hot sauce out of your eyes (cue Mazur getting hot sauce in her eyes, the two of them having a good laugh about it, and their relationship commencing from there), but there are a few more practical questions to consider. While soft tacos could conceivably be eaten in one bite, wouldn't their lack of structural integrity, in keeping with basic physical and biological laws, make such a feat impossible to pull off while doing a front flip? Is this fringe sport popular on the West Coast? Where did that trampoline come from, anyway? These questions have to be asked during the course of The Learning Curve, lest the mind atrophy from lack of nourishment. Schwab, a former second-unit director for Brian De Palma, operates in the slick, morally relative universe of L.A. noir, but he drastically miscalculates the appeal of his two antiheroes, who commit petty crimes less out of desperation than out of excessive laziness and narcissism. When Mazur and Giovinazzo move from perpetrating sexual shakedowns on businessmen to working bigger scams for a sleazy record producer (Vincent Ventresca), it's merely a difference in scale, not transgression, so Mazur's sudden crisis of conscience isn't remotely believable. Banal when it isn't terrible—a heated argument with city councilmen over whether the evil Ventresca's architectural model is a "mall" or an "entertainment complex" is a particular low point—The Learning Curve backs its way into an orgy of violence that's as unpleasant as it is obligatory. And to think, if the lovers had just stuck to Xtreme taco-eating, none of this would have happened.