You can tell how bad some movies will be from the very beginning. How To Be a Latin Lover isn’t one of them. The beginning only of this movie only provides a hint of how bad it is.

Maximo (Eugenio Derbez) has made it his life’s work to not do any work. As a young man, he latched onto a wealthy older woman, and she took care of him for 25 years. But then one day, she dumped him for a younger man, and Maximo was left with nothing. His best friend (played by Rob Lowe) was also a kept man and couldn’t help him out with a place to stay, so Maximo found himself on his sister Sara’s (Salma Hayek) doorstep. He hadn’t made any attempt to keep up with her or her son Hugo (Raphael Alejandro), but they took pity on him and allowed him to stay. Still hoping to find a rich old woman to take care of him, Maximo tries to help Hugo win over a classmate (Arden, played by McKenna Grace), so that Maximo can get close to her grandmother Celeste (Raquel Welch).

This is a movie that tries to be a comedy, but clearly not too hard because it never provides anything in the vicinity of amusement. It has people in it who have been funny (also including Kristen Bell, Michael Cera, Rob Corddry, Rob Riggle, Rob Huebel, and Linda Lavin), and it’s directed by Ken Marino, but they certainly didn’t lend any of their comedy experience to the film. Some of that fault lies with the writers (Jon Zack, who has two other features under his belt, and Chris Spain who doesn’t seem to have any other credits), but their crappy material didn’t get any help from the cast. I can only assume that each of the actors was there for a giant paycheck or because of incriminating photos, because they clearly don’t care about the material, but I have no problem blaming the writers for the tremendously uninspired, utterly predictable, excessively long, and blatantly formulaic storyline.

There’s really not much else to say about it, and since no one really put any effort into making it, I won’t waste any more of my time on it.