The Love Guru

Miserably, Wretchedly Awful, October 15, 2008

By 

Sir Charles Panther “Life is hard. It’s hard… (Alexandria, Virginny, USandA) –

  

  

I remember the negative rumblings when this film was in production. The advance screening reviews did not treat it well, and most reviews once it opened also were not good, some of them downright brutal. Then it was in and out of my local megaplexes in less than a month. Now it’s on DVD, right after the end of the summer, not even waiting for the holiday market, not even tying into some kind of wacky Halloween marketing-thing.

Through all of these increasingly negative omens I kept faith, figuring, “Hey, it’s Mike Myers, the man who brought us “Sprockets” on Saturday Night Live, the Wayne’s World guy, the Austin Powers guy.” I like to watch So I Married an Axe Murderer when it’s on cable; I even know most of that crazy “O, Harriett” beat poem. I knew that while this particular film might not be his best, that it could be Mike Myers’ Blame It On Rio, that I’d still find it overall funny and entertaining.

Not so. This film is absolute junk, right from the beginning. It was so awful, I turned it off after 40 minutes.

Yes, it really is that bad. In Amazon.com reviews I have savaged–given them what they’re due, actually–that ridiculous CGI-permeated gunk Van Helsing and that vapid Hollywood The Stepford Wives (Special Collector’s Edition) garbage, and I recently let I Am Legend have it as well, each for their own failings. But I sat through each of those stinkers, right through to the end titles. This one didn’t even earn that level of interest and respect. By forty minutes, I had had enough of the idiotic humor, the flat jokes, the bad characters, Myers wallowing in his own grossly overinflated sense of comedic creativity and personal hip-itude, and I had no interest at all in seeing how it would all turn out.

Myers plays a wacky Indian guru, a holy man specializing in love and relationships, but he has neither love nor a relationship of his own, and a clanking elephant-head chastity belt to boot. The guru comes across as self-centered, money-grubbing, commercially prostituted, demented, capricious, manipulative and foul. There is no serenity, no grace, not the slightest indication of any kind of scholarly depth, just a rapid-fire stream of idiotic caca-doody and genital jokes. It’s all urine and feces, phallic goofs, simulated pain inflicted on male sexual parts, the kind of stuff I found trite once I matured into 7th grade. Now, I love the Jackass movies, so I know from funny in slapstick agony, genitals and excretory humor. But this film was just mindless, moronic junk, a collection of Myers’ jokes and stupid puns, the stuff that didn’t make the cut for the second Austin Powers sequel, run together with a contrived, meandering, patchwork, pathetically predictable story.

If you’ve seen the film, you’ll know that Myers’ Guru Pitka would say that this film is pure Comprehensive Radical Adjustment Participation.

I mean, in the scene in which Myer’s guru and his destined love have their first big date, he has arranged a very special meal which looks exactly like human testicles. Both he and Jessica Alba bray their way through the endless stupid jokes, it all ending with the hilariously beaten and mutilated edible having to be discarded. We’ve already been beaten over the head that the guru wants Alba as THE love of his incongruously empty life, and so this is the way he, The Love Guru, the man who has so much depth and experience in love and relationships, creates his first impression for his one-and-only? Absolute garbage.

Myers’ Indian guru character offended even me, and I’m about as white-bread as they come. His bad Indian accent drifted in between the Saturday Night Live/”So I Married an Axe Murderer” Scottish Dad, Fat Bastard and Shrek. I mean, he couldn’t even take the time to get his Indian accent down, so busy was he working on these complex, meaningful, mutually reinforcing gags about elephant dung and fighting with mops dripping with the fresh urine of his deeply honored guru-master.

Vern Troyer is reduced to spewing profanities, being the butt of increasingly vicious little-person jokes and a series of demeaning, ugly sight gags in which he is always the victim of physical violence.

Ben Kingsley–the guy who played freeking Gandhi, and won the…

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No Karma, No Laughs, July 20, 2008

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Scott T. Rivers (Los Angeles, CA USA) –

  

  

Mike Myers’ latest attempt to emulate the comic genius of Peter Sellers falls painfully flat. With the proper script and direction, “The Love Guru” concept would have been ideal for Sellers in the late 1960s. Though Myers deserves a little credit for trying something different, the material simply isn’t there.

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