The first thing to realize is that it’s not just an eagle versus a shark, but an awkward, unattractive eagle versus an equally pathetic and inexpressive shark. And they never once actually fight (though we all know who would win).

It’s become something of a fad to copy the kinetic stylings of director Wes Anderson as a way to hide one’s own inability to write believably human characters. Soon after Mr. Anderson’s furtively creative “Rushmore” hit theaters in 1998, a wave of imitators landed in Hollywood, exemplified by the mean-spirited Jared Hess and his hate comedy “Napoleon Dynamite,” as well as last year’s bitter “Little Miss Sunshine.”

Films like these trade in vintage Anderson quirk, but fail to replicate the heart beating beneath the awkwardness of his stories. At the center of Mr. Anderson’s two best films, “Rushmore” and “The Royal Tenenbaums,” we find a socially maladjusted teenager and an incommunicative family, but the driving force behind both comedies is the same: The characters are constantly seeking to better themselves and to be good people. They just happen to stumble hilariously along the way. The Anderson canon is one of genuine goodness striving to break free from the confines of arrogance and, occasionally, banality.

In its wake, we have too often been given strange characters buoyed by nothing, tossed up onscreen purely for our mean-spirited amusement, that we may chuckle as they flounder endlessly. So it goes with Taika Cohen’s “Eagle vs. Shark,” a movie about two awkward would-be lovers who start and end the movie in nearly exactly the same place.

Jarrod (Jemaine Clement, about to hit the HBO scene in “Flight of the Conchords”) is the gawky, gangly guy who comes into the hamburger joint every day in oversize glasses, his lip curling up in an involuntary twitch, and his voice coming out in a bored drawl. Lily (Loren Horsley) is the tight-lipped, wide-eyed, near-silent cashier who waits for Jarrod to arrive each day so she can take his order. In the movie’s first scene, we see her improvise the way her dream interaction with Jarrod would go: She professes her love for him, he says her affections are “cool,” and the pair sails off in bliss.

But things aren’t that easy — hence the need for this protracted movie about a most uncomfortable courtship between two seemingly sexless, soulless, and senseless people. To keep things short: Jarrod finally talks to Lily one day, to ask if she can deliver an invitation to her more attractive co-worker. The event in question is a dress-up party, where guests dress like their favorite animals. Jarrod adorns an eagle beak and Lily hides herself in the mouth of a shark. After she impresses him with some skill in the party’s video game tournament, the two consummate their love. He invites her on a road trip back to his hometown, where he’s heading to settle a score with an old classmate who used to beat him up. Once there, Lily is awash in Jarrod’s awkward home life, complete with a dancing little sister (à la “Little Miss Sunshine”) and an awkward best friend who yucks and guffaws but never says anything (think the older brother from “Napoleon Dynamite”).

As the day of the big fight approaches, Jarrod puts on an orange head band and practices his skills by taking jabs at cardboard cutouts and setting fire to wooden replicas of his enemy. Admittedly, there is a lot here to distract the viewer from the fact that Jarrod is a loser and Lily is a desperate woman with shattered self-esteem. Road trip scenes merge into family scenes, which cut to battle prep montages and family bickering; all of it conjures a certain Tweedle-Dum and Tweedle-Dee aesthetic as these two carefully inch toward each other because, deep down, they seem like the same person.

Well, maybe they are and maybe they aren’t — but we can never tell. This is not a movie about two well-rounded individuals, but about two ungainly constructs that function more as props than people.

Sporadically throughout the film, there is a series of stop-action sequences involving two apples — apples that seem to flirt with each other and, when they are tossed away as worthless cores, fall in love. There’s more heart and emotional power in these brief clips — totaling some three minutes in length — than in the remainder of this movie. These two apples, through no fault of their own, have been kicked to the gutter while searching for their soul mate; Lily, meanwhile, passively shuffles behind the boneheaded yet perpetually arrogant Jarrod, who doesn’t even seem to enjoy her company.

The apples get some laughs, as do Mr. Clement and Ms. Horsley. But we seem to laugh with the lovelorn produce while laughing at the glaring shortcomings of these flawed humans.