Review of The Love Guru (2008) by Kyle F — 18 Dec 2009

Two thumbs down!!!!! This is the wrost Mike Myers movie ever. The Love Guru is about Darren Roanoke the star player of the Toronto Maple Leafs, is suffering from stress because his girlfriend, Prudence Roanoke has left him for the Los Angeles Kings French-Canadian goaltender Jacques "Le Coq" Grandé. The stress affects his hockey performance. Jane Bullard enlists the support of Love Guru Maurice Pitka, to help Darren with his stress so that the team can hopefully break their losing streak, and win the stanley cup. In addition to getting a considerable payment, Pitka would be invited to the Oprah show, which he hopes would help him become the #1 guru, a place currently held by Deepak Chopra.

I think there are some great ideas here that could have been brought out hilariously if the screenwriters had been more interested in the characters than the wacky characterisations. Some of Mike Myers gags are not actually funny, A few funny cameos by celebrities helps, and just enough to hit the target, most notably the self-help acronyms and mnemonics, though this wears thin as the story gets increasingly stupid.

The problem is that Mike Myers character just isn't very likeable, and his jokes fall flat. Most jokes are centred around either genitalia or that Austin Powers-style sexuality, which kinda makes you think your watching Austin Powers all over again.

The acting sucked, Jessica Alba had little to do but play herself as the romantic foil, Romany Malco's acting sucked the whole movie, Justin Timberlake is rather goofily embarrassing, but still funny at times, Vern Troyer is just the victim of a series of small people jokes and as for Ben Kingsley's guru character, what was up with that?

In addition, director Marco Schnabel has no sense of comic timing, laboriously spelling out every joke as if he's waiting for the slower audience members to catch up. As such, there are no big laughs and the only good bit of the film involves a brief fantasy sequence of Jessica Alba doing a Bollywood routine. In conclusion, the badly written script doesn't even attempt to nail its emotional climaxes, instead relying on a set-piece involving two elephants humping each other on the ice, that falls embarrassingly flat. I wouldn't recommand this movie at all if your looking for a comedy, actually I would just stay away altogether, from this bad tasting comedy.