Movie Review - 'The Love Guru'

The Love Guru

Starring Mike Myers, Jessica Alba, and Justin Timberlake
Directed by Marco Schnabel
Rated PG-13

It happens less often than you think, but when it does, you should plant yourself on the fringe and watch: A group of movie critics walking out of a movie so bad they huddle up in a semi-circle, speechless, trying to find just the right words to define what they just saw. Usually, it's a hyperbolic "That's the worst movie I think I've ever seen," which would be easy to dismiss if it wasn't said so sincerely.

The Love Guru is not, in fact, the worst movie I think I've ever seen; the worst movie I've seen professionally is either Freddy Got Fingered (which is the only movie I walked out of) or Swept Away. However,The Love Guru, for a number of reasons, is the worst movie I've seen this year.

Let's break it down analytically, beginning with why this is worse than my previous lowest-ranked flick of the year, Over Her Dead Body. For starters, neither one of them is funny although that's the intention in both cases. Over Her Dead Body gets credit, though, for not being unfunny, and there's a key difference. Movies that aren't funny simply don't make you laugh. Movies that are unfunny are woefully misguided into thinking that its antics will make somebody - anybody - laugh.

With Over Her Dead Body, I can see where the jokes were going and when you're supposed to react. I just didn't because everything in that movie was so poorly executed. With The Love Guru, I don't understand on any level how slapping someone in the face with a urine-soaked mop is ever funny, how ribald dick jokes in the form of names like Guru Tugginmypuddha, Cherkov, and Jacques "Le Coq" Grande made it here from the sixth grade, or how every scene that requires a joke also requires that it is a dick joke. Why, there's even a reference to the capital of Thailand. 

That very specific brand of uncomedy is clearly all Mike Myers has left. Of course, when you haven't been funny in nine years, you generally aim for the lowest of the lowest common denominators, and while he's hit that target, Myers has ignored everything else, from a story and characters worth watching to comedy that might come from somewhere above the belt.

And yet, this is the movie Myers waited five years to complete. The story, about a best-selling self-help guru hired to reunite a hockey player with his wife so the team can win the Stanley Cup, is simplistic enough that if Myers had developed anything funny for it, it could've been OK. Not great, mind you, but passable. But much like his last Austin Powers creation, Goldmember (hey, another dick joke!), you just watch the Guru Pitka blankly because the character clearly means more to Myers than to any of us.

The parade of groin-based comedy, which by itself is unoriginal and desperately unfunny, is surrounded by undeveloped characters like the hockey player Darren Roanake (Romany Malco), who can't play well in front of his mother...and that's about the end of his story, team owner Jane Bullard (Jessica Alba), who can't put a winning team on the ice and can't find a man until she becomes smitten with the Guru (uh huh), and the Guru's greedy assistant (John Oliver), who shows up more as the devil on the Guru's shoulder once every 25 minutes rather than an actual member of the ensemble. Oh, incidentally, that character's name is Dick Pants, which isn't funny and doesn't even make any sense.

Even if it were funny, this would contend for worst of the year because the setup is so boring and goes nowhere, and the central character is repellent. Hard to win in a comedy when that's the case. You simply couldn't have made a worse version of this movie if you tried. And yet, it doesn't appear that Mike Myers even did that much.

Comments

[AirCraft]

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