It's a shame that HBO hired a lousy screenplay writer and made a supposedly good concept gone so bad. The scenes in this film all looked staged, contrite, and pretentious. Maria Conchita Alonso used to be a pretty good actor, but she ruined her face with terrible plastic surgery, so her face now looked so weird and out of a place in a 840+ small village in New Mexico, and played a quite unimportant and unnecessary role as the mother of the leading female character, Javiera Torres, played by Dania Ramirez, an actor with limited talent but nonetheless was also further ruined by the horrible screenplay, the dialog made her confusing, pretentious and weak. Andrew Carter who played the goofy and sneaky boy friend of Javiera Torres, was a very weird cast; a white guy existed in a 99% small Latino village, hooking up with a local single mother with a cute and smart young daughter, was such a highly unlikely ridiculous figure in this film, and his acting in this film was just terrible and fake. Santino Fontana, who played the leading character, Joel Flanagan, was trying so hard to act and look like the co-heir of his family business, but didn't look and feel like a convincing enough figure. Then, again, all the other supporting actors, playing touring retirees or other vague characters, acted terrible and awkward, also further ruined by the lousy screenplay and bad directing. Those local villagers acted so unnaturally.
Beautiful locality cinematography, nice little Latino village(town?), some macro shots of the fascinating Mexican dishes. The romance? Forget about it, man.
We've seen many films about the food, cuisines, family biz...but this "Off the Menu" is the weakest and the worst one.
