"The Love Guru" Film Review

Bug's Take:

It’s pretty sad when the best part of your movie is when Jessica Alba’s acting is better than yours. So it goes for Mike Myers in The Love Guru. The fact is (hard-pressed I am to admit it), I’ve seen a lot of Alba movies and she usually ruins a lot of them for me whether it’s her lack of ability to act, or that her body and face is so beautiful, I find myself wanting to leave the movie theater (or stop the DVD player) and immediately begin purging my popcorn and Milk Duds and replace them with a hundred ab crunches. She’s that pretty. But here, she outshines (barely) all the other players in a little film I consider disastrous from beginning to end.

Plot line: Myers is a love guru who is hired by the owner of the Toronto Maple Leafs hockey team (Alba) to reunite their superstar (Romany Malco) with his wife (Meagan Good) because he plays terrible while they’re apart but she’s so heartbroken she’s shacking up with another hockey player (played by Justin Timberlake). It’s supposed to be a comedy, right? I heard a lot of things prior to this movie being released into the theaters. Myers himself promoted the hell out of it from cameos in other previews, to popping up on award shows on MTV in character, to doing the standard interview shows and cracking jokes from his own movie . . .

I don’t have to sugarcoat anything seeing that it’s just B! Child and I writing the reviews and I’m fairly certain that both of us aren’t offended by each other’s words. So I’m going to put this very bluntly: The Love Guru is a terrible terrible movie and any DVD sales it generates only fills the pockets of the unworthy. At least for this film. Because it was Myers’ film to make or break, and this time, he breaks it. There just isn’t enough highlights to justify the many cameos/famous people that agreed to be in this film: the great Ben Kingsley, Jessica Simpson, Kanye West, Stephen Colbert, and a personal favorite of mine, Jim Gaffigan who holds the movies’ only truly funny character. But even he’s not enough to save this pitiful script.

The one guy I always like in his roles is Romany Malco – who plays Darren Roanoke – but unlike his characters in 40-Year Old Virgin and Baby Mama, Malco is not given as many funny one-liners I know him to be capable of. More than likely it’s the bad writing. Timberlake makes a few nice comedic moments (check out the Celine Dion karaoke moment) as the hockey player who steals Roanoke’s girlfriend and is well-known for having a rather “large male appendage,” but it’s a joke that really only gets half a laugh the first time, then becomes stale much like the rest of the movies’ blasé theme.

I’m usually the girl who tries really hard to find something good within each movie knowing that whatever film I write one day will have several flaws I wish I would’ve caught and changed, but in The Love Guru, I really didn’t try because the movie fizzled quickly and the only reason I didn’t turn it off was because I can’t write a full review with only half a flick watched.

I think you catch my drift. Skip this movie. Go get something else, anything else, that resembles a comedy. Odds are, it has more laughs than the Guru.

B!'s Take:

Wow. That’s all I have to say about this movie. Just . . . wow.

That’s not a good wow by the way. Not even close. I am actually fighting a very strong urge right now to make this a three-word film review.

Those three words: This movie sucked. Balls. Sorry, that’s four words, but the balls were definitely needed in this case as a modifier to let you know exactly how bad this movie sucked.

Look, I’m not that much of a fan of Mike Myers anymore. I liked him on Saturday Night Live, and the whole “Wayne’s World” thing was hilarious to me at one point. I even saw “Wayne’s World 2” in the theater to give you an idea of how much I liked that character. “So I Married An Axe Murderer” is definitely up there on my favorite comedies list (I take that back, it’s not really that high up there, but it is very quotable and entertaining to say the least).

Myers started to lose me when he did the Shrek films (I’m not a fan of animation of any kind, especially computer animation) and his turn as “The Cat In The Hat” was so bad I never made it through the whole movie when I tried to watch it on HBO.

I’m not even going to get into the whole “Austin Powers” film library because those were movies I absolutely loved to watch over and over (and over and over). And that over watchability is the biggest problem I have with “The Love Guru” because it absolutely doesn’t have that. In fact, I fell asleep three times while trying to get through this movie, and this is from a guy who LOVES movies.

You could say this film was a swing and a miss, but I have a better analogy for it. This movie was like Mike Myers walking into a reunion party full of friends who love and missed him while he was gone and at the perfect moment of silence during the party trying to fart but trying so hard to squeeze the potentially hilarious fart out he accidentally crapped his pants. There still humor in seeing someone crap his pants on accident, but the fart would have been much funnier and far less stinky in the long run.

I know that’s a pretty crass way to put it, but I think I might have nailed it. This movie tries WAY too hard to be funny, even to the point of laughing at itself as if to tell you, “Hey, that thing I just said is a joke. I’m laughing, you should too.” The plot even seems like it is an afterthought and just a skeleton so Myers could string an endless stream of gags end to end until the final credits rolled.

There are funny parts, of course, since this is Mike Myers we are talking about, but you keep getting the feeling that you already saw a different, better version of the same joke in one of his other films. Case in point, there are scenes of Myers’ character Guru Pitka riding a motorized “magic carpet” through an airport that are so reminiscent of his scenes as Dr. Evil’s motorized chair in the Austin Power’s trilogy that I kept wondering when The Love Guru was going to go to his secret lair.

To go through the performances briefly, Jessica Alba seemed to have been cast based solely on the fact she is Canadian and has to play one in the movie (and even then I didn’t believe it for one second. Why is she famous again?), Verne Troyer plays a skeezy asshole which hits too close to home if you’ve ever seen him on a reality show, Justin Timberlake (who I normally find to be very likeable and entertaining) tries really hard to make his character funny but ends up sounding like a bad impersonation of John Cleese’s Insulting Frenchman character from “Monty Python and The Holy Grail,” Romany Malco seems to be good at everything he does but his character has such a ridiculous “problem” that I don’t think Meryl Streep could have done any better than he did.

Good God this movie was bad. The best thing about it was that it lost $20 million at the box office (I still don’t see how it could have possibly cost $67 million to make unless Myers took $20 million off the top) so we don’t really have to worry about a Love Guru Part 2 anytime soon. Hopefully.

B!