When you sit down to watch a Mike Myers movie realize that you have made the conscious decision to view something totally inane, slapstick and crude. On the other hand, there is another valid line of thought that would argue anyone who would watch a Mike Myers film is incapable of rational, conscious thought. A point well taken I must admit. With that said, if you're still reading this review we know what camp you fall into.
In the '08 film `The Love Guru' Mr. Myers plays Guru Pitka, the second most popular spiritual teacher in the Occidental world, second to Deepak Chopra of course. Guru Pitka finally gets the opportunity to possibly move out of the number two position when he's hired by the owner of the Toronto Maple Leafs hockey team (Jessica Alba) to restore the broken marital relationship between their star player and his estranged wife who has moved in with the Los Angeles Kings well endowed goalie (Justin Timberlake). If he's successful he will not only be handed a two million dollar check but has been promised a booking to appear on the Oprah Winfrey Show! As you should have already guessed his spiritual instructional methods are, shall we say suspect and the storyline loaded with the usual gag routines, inside jokes and shots at anyone and everyone. In other words typical Mike Myers faire.
Hey, it could be a lot worse, Jessica Alba is gorgeous, diminutive Vern Troyer is adorable as the Maple Leafs coach and Justin Timberlake is surprisingly entertaining. There is definitely an audience out there for this one and you know who you are. For everyone else a couple beers before viewing might by in order.
From the moment I first heard Mike Meyer's new film "The Love Guru" and Steve Carell's new film "Get Smart" would be released on the same day, I was surprised. Common practice in Hollywood dictates you don't release two such similar films on the same day. At best, you are going to split the audience, and both films could suffer. This seems to have been born out by the box office, with "The Love Guru" suffering.
Because both films were released on the same day, I decided to see both, back to back. And I am going to write about both, back to back.
The Love Guru ***
Get Smart *
I really get the sense Mike Meyer's is trying to channel the spirit of Peter Sellers. Consciously or not, he has created two characters with more than a few similarities to some of Sellers' most famous creations. Austin Powers has more than a few things in common with Inspector Clouseau and now the Guru Pitka has more than a few things in common with Harundai V. Bakshi, Sellers character in the less well-known Blake Edward's film "The Party". Meyers is a talented guy, a funny guy, who seems to obsess over every detail in his films. Sellers was, reportedly, the same way. While Sellers' characters will continue to endure the test of time, we don't know if the more modern Meyer's work will have the same outcome. It's too early to tell.
Meyer's "The Love Guru" is a silly film. From the moment I first saw the trailer, I laughed, a lot. Filled with silly, "Austin Powers"-esque comedy, there were a lot of jokes packed in that trailer and the movie delivers more of the same.
The movie is very silly and packed with jokes, many of which work and many of which don't. The jokes fly fast and furious, and Meyers certainly tries very hard to get the audience to laugh. I half expected someone to throw a cream pie at Meyers. But there is also the smack of familiarity to many of the jokes. They could easily have been trans planted into "Austin Powers 4" and provided the same laughs. It also seems odd that Verne Troyer is also in the new film, playing a different character, but his presence makes the comparisons to Austin Powers all the more prevalent. And many of the jokes concerning his character revolve around the same humor Mini-Me elicited in the Powers films.
If anything is to be learned from Meyer's comedy, he loves midgets and fart jokes, both providing equal opportunity for laughs.
Meyers has done a lot of interviews and in many he has mentioned the profound impact the death of his father had on his life. This led him to meet Depak Chopra, the very famous guru and self-help coach who has apparently provided Meyers with a lot of guidance. "The Love Guru" tells the story of Guru Pitka, the Number Two guru in the United States, behind Deepak Chopra. Pitka desperately wants to become Number One and the Toronto Maple Leafs provide him with an opportunity, their star goalie Darren Roanoake (Romany Malco, "The 40 Year Old Virgin") has broken up with his wife Prudence (Meagan Good) and is not playing well. With the Stanley Cup around the corner, the team's owner, Jane Bullard (Jessica Alba), hires Pitka to bring Roanoke and Prudence back together. Naturally, there are complications. Pitka finds himself attracted to Jane and Prudence is dating the star goalie for the Los Angeles Kings, a Celine Dion-loving Canadian, Jacques "The Cock" Grande (Justin Timberlake).
Meyers lets the jokes fly fast and furious; from the opening frames when we hear narration by Morgan Freeman, to the Guru Pitka's constant use of bad trademarked sayings, the film has a lot of laughs. But Meyers is also dependent on scatological humor and there are a lot of jokes involving farts, bowel movements, accidents and more, jokes too silly for even this film.
"The Love Guru" suffers from a number of small problems. The first is the humor throughout the film is so juvenile; it is extremely hit and miss. Everyone can only take so many fart jokes or jokes about 'messing your pants'. The other thing I found odd about the film is that at a couple of key moments, they don't go far enough with the ideas. Early on, Pitka remembers a key moment in his life and we watch it much like a Bollywood film, complete with scratches and film burn. This is a great idea and only reinforces the wackiness of the story and the idea, but it only lasts a few moments. At the end of the film, Pitka claims "I want to dance" and a Bollywood musical number begins in a small seaside village. Jessica Alba dances out, his assistant becomes a part of the entourage, even Verne Troyer takes part. This is a moment, much like the end of "The 40 Year Old Virgin", when you would expect all of the characters to join in and start dancing in a highly synchronized way to an American rock song, in this case "The Rocker". But the dance number only involves the few characters mentioned and only lasts a few seconds. It seems like they ran out of money and simply had to get what they could.
Also, I have seen a number of films recently in which well-known comedians play Sports Commentators (most of these star Will Farell as he seems to have the lock on this franchise, "Semi-Pro", "Blades of Glory"). In "The Love Guru", Stephen Colbert and Jim Gaffigan play hockey commentators and they suffer from the same fate as the others; they simply aren't funny. Each of these characters is decidedly "wacky", and says "off-color" things, and tries to act like they are weird and funny. But in each of these films, the characters look like they are trying to act weird and funny and this does little than to slow down the rest of the story.
It is amusing that Meyers is making fun of something so ripe for parody. But he also takes aim at the very type of thing Chopra has risen above, making his character a more desperate version of someone like Chopra. It works, but not all the time.
Buy Love Guru, The (2013) Now
I remember the negative rumblings when this film was in production. The advance screening reviews did not treat it well, and most reviews once it opened also were not good, some of them downright brutal. Then it was in and out of my local megaplexes in less than a month. Now it's on DVD, right after the end of the summer, not even waiting for the holiday market, not even tying into some kind of wacky Halloween marketing-thing.
Through all of these increasingly negative omens I kept faith, figuring, "Hey, it's Mike Myers, the man who brought us "Sprockets" on Saturday Night Live, the Wayne's World guy, the Austin Powers guy." I like to watch So I Married an Axe Murderer when it's on cable; I even know most of that crazy "O, Harriett" beat poem. I knew that while this particular film might not be his best, that it could be Mike Myers' Blame It On Rio, that I'd still find it overall funny and entertaining.
Not so. This film is absolute junk, right from the beginning. It was so awful, I turned it off after 40 minutes.
Yes, it really is that bad. In Amazon.com reviews I have savaged--given them what they're due, actually--that ridiculous CGI-permeated gunk Van Helsing and that vapid Hollywood The Stepford Wives (Special Collector's Edition) garbage, and I recently let I Am Legend have it as well, each for their own failings. But I sat through each of those stinkers, right through to the end titles. This one didn't even earn that level of interest and respect. By forty minutes, I had had enough of the idiotic humor, the flat jokes, the bad characters, Myers wallowing in his own grossly overinflated sense of comedic creativity and personal hip-itude, and I had no interest at all in seeing how it would all turn out.
Myers plays a wacky Indian guru, a holy man specializing in love and relationships, but he has neither love nor a relationship of his own, and a clanking elephant-head chastity belt to boot. The guru comes across as self-centered, money-grubbing, commercially prostituted, demented, capricious, manipulative and foul. There is no serenity, no grace, not the slightest indication of any kind of scholarly depth, just a rapid-fire stream of idiotic caca-doody and genital jokes. It's all urine and feces, phallic goofs, simulated pain inflicted on male sexual parts, the kind of stuff I found trite once I matured into 7th grade. Now, I love the Jackass movies, so I know from funny in slapstick agony, genitals and excretory humor. But this film was just mindless, moronic junk, a collection of Myers' jokes and stupid puns, the stuff that didn't make the cut for the second Austin Powers sequel, run together with a contrived, meandering, patchwork, pathetically predictable story.
If you've seen the film, you'll know that Myers' Guru Pitka would say that this film is pure Comprehensive Radical Adjustment Participation.
I mean, in the scene in which Myer's guru and his destined love have their first big date, he has arranged a very special meal which looks exactly like human testicles. Both he and Jessica Alba bray their way through the endless stupid jokes, it all ending with the hilariously beaten and mutilated edible having to be discarded. We've already been beaten over the head that the guru wants Alba as THE love of his incongruously empty life, and so this is the way he, The Love Guru, the man who has so much depth and experience in love and relationships, creates his first impression for his one-and-only? Absolute garbage.
Myers' Indian guru character offended even me, and I'm about as white-bread as they come. His bad Indian accent drifted in between the Saturday Night Live/"So I Married an Axe Murderer" Scottish Dad, Fat Bastard and Shrek. I mean, he couldn't even take the time to get his Indian accent down, so busy was he working on these complex, meaningful, mutually reinforcing gags about elephant dung and fighting with mops dripping with the fresh urine of his deeply honored guru-master.
Vern Troyer is reduced to spewing profanities, being the butt of increasingly vicious little-person jokes and a series of demeaning, ugly sight gags in which he is always the victim of physical violence.
Ben Kingsley--the guy who played freeking Gandhi, and won the Oscar for it--is reduced to playing a cross-eyed clown. Sad.
Jessica Alba is stunning, predictably, but still just can't act, even in this shallow story.
And then there was the endless parade of celebs who want to be in a Mike Myers film, from Val Kilmer to Oprah, bad and forced cameos all, the kind of overblown star-packing formula that made me puke in "Goldmember."
The only good part I encountered lasted all of 20 seconds, a wonderfully done, detailed spin on the typical Bollywood boy-girl musical number, with Myers and Alba. It was great, right down to the disorienting camera zooms, the impossible physical backdrops, the music and lyrics, the nauseatingly deep, warbling color and a jittery box with understated yet funny subtitles. This was what this film should have been.
Bottom line: Avoid this film; there is nothing redeeming in it. For a more entertaining South Asian romantic comedy experience, watch The Guru instead.
Read Best Reviews of Love Guru, The (2013) Here
Mike Myers is off his game with this one, and not close to the level of Wayne's World and the first two Austin Powers films. It's painfully hard to watch, unless you drank so much in your adolescence/early 20s that you still have the mentality of a 13 year old. Myers is constantly spouting off cheap half brained catch phrases (Intamacy or Into me I see) and throwing up so much toilet humor, that you can tell he's trying hard to compress this turd of a script into a diamond. This is worth a rent only, not a buy (especially for the higher price of Blu Ray).
Want Love Guru, The (2013) Discount?
"The Love Guru" stars Mike Myers who gave us two successful films years ago, "Austin Powers" and "Shrek." Both films, witty and hugely entertaining, featured characters you can identify with, had lots of funny jokes and clever parodies of a certain film genre. Then in 2003 he made awful "The Cat in the Hat." We waited for five years since then and what we get is "The Love Guru," another disappointing film from Mike Myers.
"The Love Guru" has none of the style that made "Austin Powers" such a success. Mike Myers plays Guru Pitka, an American-born self help guru raised in India. Without letting us know how and why he was raised in India and became a guru, the film proceeds to tell us that Guru Pitka is hired by a hockey team owner played by Jessica Alba because her team's star player, she believes, really needs the help of the spiritual leader. But why a hockey player?
I know comedy is a subjective thing. Not everybody is going to laugh at the same thing. Don't get me wrong. I like silly jokes. I like sex jokes. But something is definitely wrong with the comedy when the actors start to look like desperate standup comic or clown waiting for laughs that will never come, trying to make us laugh with whatever gags he thinks of cross-eyed Ben Kingsley's mentor, repetitious "Mariska Hargitay" mantra and of course, elephants.
Perhaps "The Love Guru," Mike Myers's Razzie-winning comedy, does not deserve the award given to the year's worst film. Compare it with any films directed by Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer and their "spoofs," and maybe Myers's latest effort will look slightly better. And Stephen Colbert was hilarious.
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