Review of How to Be a Latin Lover (2017) by Kristofer H — 03 May 2017

Proper Perspective: Comedies in most cases feel like they follow a generic beat with yucks and then drama and then a happy ending, unfortunately there was not invention here. Some comedies pepper in drama well, this does not... Let's talk about How to be a Latin Lover (the movie)...

Official Synopsis: Finding himself dumped after 25 years of marriage, a man who made a career of seducing rich older women must move in with his estranged sister, where he begins to learn the value of family.

Plot: A lazy gold digging man is dumped by his beneficiary and is forced to figure out the next phase of his life with his sister, her son, and the strange community of men marrying trying to land older, rich women.

Take: This movie starts off with a semi-fresh premise of a young boy who sees what working hard does for his father, then decides he is going to be a gold digger for rich old women. Once he nets one he hangs on for 25 years until she ditches him and he has to figure out the next phase of his life.

The laughs were there. This is a fairly funny movie and is going to be funnier to the demographic it is designed for than others. In no way is this a broad universal comedy.

Oddly enough the best jokes and laughs were written for the non-Latino characters in the movie. Kristen Bell plays a frozen yogurt store worker with many, many cats who is actually very funny in the movie. She connects with lead Maximo, played by Eugenio Derbez and his nephew Hugo played by Raphael Alejandro. The three of them have good comedy together and Bell especially has some of the funnier moments. Rob Lowe plays Maximo's friend (who literally is not named) and they get into hijinks with Rob Riggle and Rob Huebel, two car print advertisement salesmen.

This movie was weird because the cultural laughs were there and the jokes were landing for the first maybe half of the movie, then it fell flat. The movie fell into the Save the Cat trap of having an inciting incident and then the dark times and then the win for the heroes at the end. It was too by the books to stand out as a good overall comedy.

Nothing new was presented outside of the novelty of a man being the gold digger and embedding the movie in the Latino culture.

None of the characters grew, learned anything, evolved or became more than the stereotype or cliché they started off as. Maximo learned from his past by literally just repeating it at the end. Sure, he was able to give his sister a job because of it, but in the end we learn to never change and nepotism rules. This movie was really bad.

I purposely did not mention Selma Hyack in this because she deserves better.

Recommendation: This movie has a set target audience and will not have very many strays showing up in the theaters, but if you were on the fence about How to be a Latin Lover I would skip it and rent Fools Rush In or Desperado or something else...

You don't open a comedy with the dad dying by falling asleep at the wheel, crashing through the house, and then blowing up. You just don't do that.