Welcome to the first installment of Guaranteed Razzie Contenders: 2009 Edition! In this special series of reviews and mini-recaps, the Agony Booth staff takes a long, unflinching look at the awful movies that are sure to be nominated for Razzie Awards in 2009!
SUMMARY: Mike Myers plays a guru, recycles jokes, and creates a perfect laugh-free zone.
Before I get to the review, I'd just like to note that I wasn't able to get this DVD to play on my computer. This means that 1) there will be no screen captures taken directly from the film, and 2) my computer might possibly be sentient, and is actively rejecting certain movies to protect itself. Of course, it also rejects Die Hard, so it could just be that my computer is a prick. Or I need a new DVD drive. Let's get on with it, shall we?
The recap continues after this advertisement...
I've come to believe in a phenomenon that I'll call SNL Funny. This occurs when a Saturday Night Live cast member, generally regarded to be pretty funny, leaves the show to do other things. Gradually, it becomes apparent that the only reason anybody thought this person was funny in the first place is because SNL is broadcast late at night, and anyone watching TV at that hour is extremely likely to be drunk, stoned, or both.
Prime examples of this can be found from the early days of SNL. Has Dan Aykroyd ever been funny without Bill Murray or someone else providing support? Adam Sandler is an ever better example, and sorry, but so was Chris Farley.
The Love Guru stars maybe the most glaring example of SNL Funny: Mike Myers. A Canadian comic with a knack for creating memorable characters, he found stardom in the late '80s and early '90s with sketches like Wayne's World, Sprockets, and... Well, those were really the only two that caught on, but either way, he got pretty famous from them.
In 1992, he made a film of Wayne's World, which proved to actually be fairly decent and successful. But it wasn't until Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery in 1997 that he became an A-list movie star. Two sequels followed and did big business. Meanwhile, Myers found even more success with the Shrek series.
In between, he did manage to launch some crap our way with 2003's Cat in the Hat, which scored him a Razzie nomination for Worst Actor, and singlehandedly killed all future film adaptations of Dr. Seuss. That movie came about partly because of a falling out Myers had with Universal over a proposed Sprockets film, and to be honest, it might have been better if Universal had just broken the guy's legs. Anyone who's seen the film can dig where I'm coming from.
Mike's talent for doing multiple characters is offset by a fairly serious flaw: He's got a really shitty sense of humor. You know the guy in the office who despite being in his mid-forties, still cracks up whenever somebody farts? That's pretty much Mike Myers in a nutshell. His sense of humor seems to have reached its highest level of sophistication at age twelve, where it has remained ever since.
The Love Guru is Myers' latest attempt at creating an iconic character on the level of Austin Powers. Or at the very least, another character whose quotes people can get sick of hearing after the film has been out for three months. On both counts, he fails, and so does the film.
The movie details the efforts of a bizarre guru to help a star hockey player win his wife back from a rival player (Justin Timberlake), who happens to be hung like a moose. Jessica Alba and Verne Troyer also show up as the team owner/love interest, and coach/source of easy jokes, respectively. Crass humor and sheer desperation on the part of everybody ensues.
Rather than go scene by scene through everything that makes the film bad, I'll just narrow it down to seven. This is going to be short and painful, folks.
The Seven Deadly Sins of The Love Guru:
1. Guru Pitka: Mike Myers has made a career out of one-joke characters that, for some reason known only to Myers, get their one and only joke run so far into the ground that it comes back smelling like magma. I honestly don't know why Myers feels the need to repeat every single joke over and over. It's not that he isn't funny; it's that he doesn't know when to let it go. Dr. Evil was funny the first few times, but after a while it got to the point where one can hardly even think of the character, let alone watch and derive humor from him. Same goes for Austin Powers, Shrek, and the stock Scottish accent Myers trots out on a regular basis.
The same can be said for Guru Pitka, the titular Love Guru, though that's really just me being generous, since the guy is amazingly off-putting right from the first frame. He's constantly making the most atrocious puns imaginable, and calling his sense of humor "crude" would be an insult to crude things. Also, he looks like a cross between Jesus Christ and famed relief pitcher Rollie Fingers, with his full beard, handlebar mustache, flowing robes, and equally flowing hair.
"My mustache is going to be referenced in what?"
The whole gimmick is that he's a guru, but the philosophy he espouses is not even funny in a Dr. Phil kind of way, where you can laugh at how amazingly retarded it all is. It's just crude gags and wordplay. Here's a little sample of the wisdom of Guru Pitka.
Guru Pitka: If your Uncle Jack helped you off an elephant, would you help your Uncle Jack off an elephant?
His primary philosophy is intimacy, or as he pronounces it, "Into-me-I-see!" There's more stuff like this, and believe me, the first time you hear it isn't any funnier than the fiftieth time you hear it.
Pitka is looking to make a ton of money from his philosophy, as well as score an appearance on Oprah. His main dilemma is that he's the #2 guru behind Deepak Chopra. And yes, a "Chopra" "Oprah" gag is trotted out. I guess Myers didn't learn much from David Letterman's Oscar stint. Gags about rhyming names only work when... Well, they never actually work. That's why no self respecting comic uses them, unless he's purposefully trying to get laughs from telling non-jokes.
Another problem is the flashbacks. More specifically, the first flashback that Pitka has to his youth. He's shown at age 12 with a young Deepak Chopra, where they both meet a bizarre guru, who I'll talk about more shortly.
While Chopra is played by a kid, Pitka is played by a kid... with Mike Myers's grown up head digitally pasted onto his shoulders. Now that's some serious nightmare fuel! Forget Quark's head on Nana Visitor's body—this scene would make Stephen King wake up in the middle of the night screaming uncontrollably.
2. The Gags: The gags are all uniformly terrible (even for a silly summer comedy), ranging from stupid puns (e.g., a village called "Harenmahkeester") to a bafflingly unfunny gag where Pitka greets people with "Mariska Hargitay!" For some odd reason, the payoff to this gag comes relatively early in the film, when the actress Mariska Hargitay herself shows up and Pitka says he'll name a center in her honor. We even get the Law & Order "clank-clank" sound effect. Yes, an elaborate gag based on the most popular show that nobody watches. This being a Mike Myers film, the gag is used repeatedly for the rest of the movie, and is about as funny as genital herpes.
There are several other cameos, including a strange appearance by Val Kilmer, where Pitka hands him a flower, he picks off a petal, and Pitka screams in pain. Kilmer is baffled, as is everyone else, including the viewer.
There's also a cameo by Mike Myers as himself. I'm not sure if a guy actually can cameo in a film he himself wrote and is starring in, but figuring all that out would take someone far better versed in advanced physics than I.
"I just called you in here to say that due to the large number of meetings we've been having here lately, you all probably have scoliosis."
The low point is probably a meeting in the office of Coach Cherkov, played by Verne Troyer. The office is half the height of a regular office, so Pitka, his assistant, his lawyer, and Jessica Alba's character have to crouch. Damn shame this gag was already used in Being John Malkovich. And at least there the joke worked, because the rest of the film was so damn weird that it fit in perfectly.
The Love Guru also has an unfortunate reliance on gross-out humor. In the aforementioned childhood flashback, a strange guru pours tea through his nose and out his ear before serving it to young Pitka. Pitka finds a nose hair in the tea, complete with an attached booger. Yeah, I know. There's more stuff like this, all hopelessly tasteless and unfunny.
