The Love Guru

Rating: *1/2

The Love Guru is utter and complete fantasy. Not because of the central character/idiot is flagrantly spitting in the face of one billion Hindus, but because it presumes that the Toronto Maple Leafs would ever make it to the Stanley Cup finals. And as for that first thing, all I have to say that if I were a practicing Hindu, I wouldn’t be writing a review right now, but be conjuring up protest signs with the efficiency of an assembly line. Not because of cultural sensitivity mind you, but because all that offensiveness is in the service of something spectacularly unfunny.

Mike Myers plays Guru Pitka, which is possibly the worst case of racial profiling since Maher Arar. Pitka lives in a fabulous LA ashra (which I’m sure is a perversion of that noun), where he receives celebrity clients and dreams of going on Oprah to secure his place as the next Deepak Chopra (who has the audacity to play himself in a cameo). Pitka is asked by Maple Leafs owner Jane (Jessica Alba) to reunite her star player, Darren Roanoke (Romany Malco), with his estranged wife Prudence (Meagan Good). This way, he’ll get over the shakes and lead the Leafs to a Stanley Cup victory over the LA Kings, whose gold-minder, Jacques Grande (Justin Timberlake), is Prudence’s new lover.

So as you can tell from the star-rating above, The Love Guru is more or less a failure. The only reason it gets two stars is because there are maybe a handful of scenes with some moderate laughs, but overall most everything is wince-inducing. And Guru looses half a star because of a Jessica Simpson cameo that proves that she doesn’t even the acting talent to play herself. Not to mention the fact that just about all the movie’s celebrity cameos get old quickly. Pitka’s greeting is “Mariska Hargitay,” so guess which Law & Order actress shows up at one of the Guru’s fun with acronyms shows.

And that’s just one of many examples of Myers’ tired shtick. The whole Hargitay joke and an accompanying SVU gag screams of some of Dr. Evil’s best pop culture puns from the Austin Powers series; remember “The Alan Parsons Project” or my personal favourite, “Moon Unit Alpha and Moon Unit Zappa.” Then when that stuff falls flat, the script turns to one of three options, the first being either a gross exaggeration or mischaracterization of Indian culture. Then, if he’s in the scene, a midget crack at the expense of Verne Troyer’s Leafs’ coach Punch Cherkov.

This leads to Love Guru’s most frequent theme: the penis gag. Not only does Pitka wear a chastity belt, not only do he and Roanoke joke about the old “ball-gazer” routine, and of course Pitka eats a “famous Indian dish” that consists of a type of nut in a doughy envelope, but one of the main gags is that Timberlake’s Grande (nicknamed “The Cock”) has a package that puts Dirk Diggler to shame. Oy! We get it, okay. No. Wait. One more thing: John Oliver’s lawyer is named Richard Pants, or AKA: “Dick Pants”. Aw, sweet! I could have written this movie half-drunk while being sleep deprived after three days without TV.

If there’s a saving grace to this movie, it’s the brief appearances of Stephen Colbert as a Hockey Night in Canada anchor, but even then I think that’s a pity vote for one of the funniest guys on TV (when doing his own stuff). It’s strange how Myers’, whose most significant film contributions in the last few years has been the Shrek films, could throw out pop culture references so stale. Singing “9 to 5” off the top of the film? Later whipping out “More than words” by Extreme? Celine Dion? I can’t think of a single memorable gag that connected, which is a far way from the first Austin Powers, which became a video hit because of how loaded it was with jokes.

It’s not that I have a problem with low brow humour; in fact, it’s usually the opposite. But somewhere between Goldmember and Love Guru, Myers went off the comedy wagon and seriously lost his mojo. Was it the pressure of having to deliver five years later, or is this just a miss? What I do know is that no matter how much mad cap mugging the lead actor can deliver, it can’t make up for the structural weaknesses that the film itself is laid upon.