The Love Guru (2008) Paramount/Comedy RT: 87 minutes Rated PG-13 (crude and sexual content throughout, language, some comic violence, drug references) Director: Marco Schnabel Screenplay: Mike Myers and Graham Gordy Music: George S. Clinton Cinematography: Peter Deming Release date: June 20, 2008 (US) Cast: Mike Myers, Jessica Alba, Justin Timberlake, Romany Malco, Meagan Good, Verne Troyer, John Oliver, Manu Narayan, Ben Kingsley, Telma Hopkins, Omid Djalili, Stephen Colbert, Jim Gaffigan. Box Office: $32.1M (US)/$40.8M (World)
Rating: *
I didn’t see The Love Guru at the movies. It looked terrible to me. Critics savaged it, audiences ignored it and Mike Myers’ career fell right into the crapper. It won three Razzies that year- Worst Picture, Actor and Screenplay. I avoided it for many years. I never had any intention of seeing it. That is, until I accepted a challenge to see how many titles on a list of 170 bad movies I saw. For the record, I saw 151. I decided right then and there to challenge myself further by watching the unseen titles. The Love Guru is on that list. I obtained a copy that day and watched it that night. I steeled myself expecting the absolute worst. That’s not exactly what I got, but it’s extremely close.
Directed by one-dud wonder Marco Schnabel, The Love Guru is crude, crass, obnoxious, gross, corny, sloppy, idiotic and offensive. It contains jokes about snots, boogers with nose hairs, urine, diarrhea, large genitalia, midget abuse, elephant sex and Celine Dion. It’s filled with offensive Indian stereotypes too. It has no value whatsoever; comedic, artistic or otherwise. It’s a movie only a moron could love and I don’t mean that in a good way.
Myers plays Guru Pitka, the number two guru in the world after Deepak Chopra with whom he grew up in an ashram run by Guru Tugginmypudha (ha, ha) played by Ben Kingsley. Yes, that Ben Kingsley! He won an Oscar for playing Gandhi. Ben, WTF?! Pitka dreams of displacing Chopra as top guru and appearing on Oprah. He gets his chance when Toronto Maple Leafs owner Jane Bullard (Alba, Sin City) hires him to help her team win the Stanley Cup. They haven’t won a championship since her father took over the team many years before. She’s the most hated person in Canada because of it. Jane wants him to help star player Darren Roanoke (Malco, Think Like a Man) get back together with his wife Prudence (Good, Think Like a Man) in hopes that it will improve his current on-ice performance. He’s been playing poorly since his wife took up with chief rival Jacques “Le Coq” Grande (Timberlake, Alpha Dog) of the Los Angeles Kings. In order to help Roanoke, Pitka has to get to bottom of what’s really ailing him. Could it be his overbearing mother (Hopkins, Family Matters)? A romance starts to develop between Pitka and Jane as well, but who didn’t see that coming?
Would I classify The Love Guru as a bad movie? In a word, yes. HELL YES! Let’s start with Myers. Once upon a time, he was funny. He created funny characters like perma-teen head banger Wayne Campbell (Wayne’s World) and randy 60s-era British secret agent Austin Powers. As a Scotsman, I’m also quite fond of So I Married an Axe Murderer. That was the 90s. Aside from his voice work in the four Shrek movies, what has he really done since then? The Cat in the Hat belongs in a litter box. Then there’s The Love Guru. His character is an amalgam of Wayne and Powers disguised as an Indian guru. When he tells a joke, he often looks right at the camera when delivering the punchline. He also laughs at his own jokes. Much of the time, he’s the only one laughing. If not for that, there’d be dead silence. It all feels rather forced. It’s like he’s begging the audience to laugh out of charity. It’s pathetic really. How can anybody laugh at something that isn’t funny?
The rest of the cast tries their best only to come off looking almost as bad as Myers. Alba wears a fake, plastered-on smile that betrays her embarrassment at appearing in this dumb movie. Timberlake looks like he’s having a bit of fun goofing on French-Canadian stereotypes- e.g. a fondness for Celine Dion. I think you can correctly guess why he’s called “Le Coq”. Heh, heh. Verne Troyer (aka Mini-Me) is the butt of too many short jokes and the target of too much dwarf abuse.
Some of The Love Guru is just gross, the low point being a fencing match with urine-soaked mops. It’s more stomach-turning than funny. Same goes for the scene where Kingsley’s character serves young Pitka and Chopra tea, pouring it through his nose into the cup. Hairy boogers, YUCK! This scene is made disturbing by the creepy effect of superimposing Myer’s adult face on the body of an adolescent. It’s unsettling not to mention fake-looking.
All of The Love Guru is stupid. For whatever reason, it opens with Myers narrating in the voice of Morgan Freeman courtesy of a voice-altering device. He then proceeds to sing a sitar-infused rendition of Dolly Parton’s “Nine to Five”. What does that song have to do with anything in the movie? I have no freaking clue! The gags about acronyms used by Pitka in his lectures become redundant quickly. I’ll admit to chuckling at “Mariska Hargitay” being used as a phony Hindi greeting. Naturally, it’s a set-up for a cameo by the SVU actress. That’s the kind of movie The Love Guru is. But is it offensive to Hindus? Theoretically, it could be. However, it’s so stupid and poorly made; I can’t see them dignifying it by reacting to it.
To be fair, I’ve seen worse than The Love Guru. It’s not even Myers’ worst movie. That would be The Cat in the Hat. It runs a close second though earning it a place in the litter box right beside that darn Cat.
