How to Be a Latin Lover

Going into Ken Marino’s sluggish and slow-witted How to Be a Latin Lover, I assumed that I could sit through literally any film that prominently featured the beautiful and charismatic Salma Hayek. After making it through two full hours of this affable but almost entirely joke-free comedy, I am 100 percent certain. An attempt to simultaneously Americanize and re-create Mexican comedian Eugenio Derbez’s 2013 crossover hit Instructions Not Included, How to Be a Latin Lover seems to follow a similar formula of lowest-brow comedy and rank sentimentalism, and it plays like it was purloined from Adam Sandler’s reject pile. Derbez stars as Maximo, a gigolo entering middle age, recently deposed from the lap of luxury to make way for a younger model (Michael Cera, one of many American comic actors making cameos here) and desperately searching for his next sugar mama. Hayek, bless her heart, costars as Maximo’s uptight sister Sara. D.B.