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For the last few months, I’ve been making all kinds of jokes about The Love Guru and how painful I expected it to be (see my summer movie preview for a good example). Still, in the back of my mind, I knew that it could just surprise me. Heck, I thought that You Don’t Mess with the Zohan was going to be horrible, too—but it ended up being a whole lot funnier than I expected.
And I will admit that The Love Guru surprised me, too—by being so much worse than I expected.
In The Love Guru, Mike Myers plays the Guru Pitka, a.k.a. The Love Guru, the second most popular guru in the world—second only to Deepak Chopra. According to his manager, Richard “Dick” Pants (John Oliver), Pitka will be able to overtake Chopra as the top guru if he can just get on Oprah.
Enter Jane Bullard (Jessica Alba), owner of the less-than-successful Toronto Maple Leafs. The Leafs are finally on their way to the Stanley Cup finals—but they can’t win without their star player, Darren Roanoke (Romany Malco). Unfortunately, Roanoke is completely off his game since splitting with his wife, Prudence (Meagan Good), who’s now seeing rival goalie Jacques “Le Coq” Grande (Justin Timberlake).
Not knowing where else to turn, Jane asks Pitka for help reuniting Darren and Prudence. If he succeeds, he’ll get a huge paycheck—not to mention a coveted spot on Oprah
As I watched The Love Guru, I had a divine revelation of my own. And it is this: when it comes down to it, there are just two kinds of comedians. There are those who are funny, and there are those who just think they are. There was a time when Mike Myers was the former—but those days are over.
Clearly, Myers thinks that The Love Guru is hilarious. In fact, he can hardly contain himself as he poses and winks and cackles at his own [bad] jokes throughout the whole spasmodic spectacle. Apparently, in his opinion, to be absolutely hilarious, one needs only to wear a goofy costume, speak in a bad accent, and say “balls” a lot (or draw them…or serve things that look like them for dinner). And if you happen to know a few good little-person jokes, that can’t hurt, either.
The only thing that came close to making me laugh in The Love Guru was Timberlake. Despite the fact that he’s little more than a long-running male-genitalia joke, he’s actually pretty funny as the French-Canadian goalie who loves Celine Dion.
Even funnier, however, was when, shortly after getting a pair of elephants to copulate in the middle of the ice, Pitka was reciting another one of his Blatantly Ridiculous Acronyms (™), and I thought to myself, If I ever run into this guy on the streets of Toronto, I swear I will punch him in the face. Just then, fellow critic Jason Zingale turned to me and whispered, “I totally want to punch him in the face.” Now that was funny. The movie, however…not at all. The gags are sophomoric and overdone, and Myers flings them at you at such a rapid pace that you’ll forget that he’s supposed to be telling some kind of a story.
In the end, I walked out of the theater feeling like I’d been sucker-punched repeatedly for an hour and a half. Not since Norbit has a movie been this painful to watch. And I can’t believe it’s even possible, but The Love Guru is so much worse.
Please don’t see this movie. You’ll only be encouraging Mike Myers to make more—and I think the next one might just kill me.
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