The Love Guru
June 21, 2008 at 12:00 p.m.
Congratulations, America. You have officially become Mike Myers’s bitch.
You have let this once-great Canadian comedian continue to dazzle you with his recycled impersonations and semi-decent dialects until he achieved A-list comedy status. And now, after gaining your admiration and trust, he feels he has free reign to make less-than-mediocre films like The Love Guru because his star power and a hot leading lady (Jessica Alba) are enough to entice audiences. For shame.
This time around, Mike Myers plays the Guru Pitka, a self-help guru bent on becoming the next Deepak Chopra. To achieve his goal, he is summoned to help Darren Roanoke (a gravely underused Romany Malco, 40-Year-Old Virgin), a lovelorn hockey star with a failed marriage and a Stanley Cup on the line at the request of team owner Jane Bullard (Jessica Alba). Guru Pitka must help Roanoke win his ex-girl (Meagan Good) back from a well-endowed rival hockey player (Justin Timberlake), employing lusty elephants, half-baked acronyms (GURU: “Gee, yoU aRe yoU!”) and flatulent noises along the way.
Needless to say, very few ingredients (curry?) in this recycled stew of Myers leftovers yield laughs. Myers plays Pitka with all the color and cheesiness of Bollywood but none of the charm, and Alba lets her looks do the talking where a non-bland performance would have been welcome. The writing relies on an unsavory combination of gratuitous scatological humor (a totally unnecessary urine-soaked mop fight), topical references (Pitka greets followers with the well-known Zen mantra, “Mariska Hargitay.”) and let’s-make-fun-of-the-little-person moments (as if Verne Troyer’s decade as “Mini-Me” wasn’t enough).
Not everything is a loss here, however. Justin Timberlake makes no attempt to take himself seriously and is, as a result, gives one of the few truly funny performances here. But the semblance of redemption for Guru comes in a fantastic supporting appearance from Stephen Colbert as a drug-addled hockey commentator.
So if you must see this movie, wait until it appears in rotation on TBS or as a VH1 "Movies That Rock” marathon, lest you pay to watch Myers butcher a certain Steve Miller Band hit, sitar in hand. Bruce Springsteen would never let him get away with those kinds of shenanigans.
V – Don’t waste your money.
Twitter
Facebook
Comments on this post