Review of The Love Guru (2008) by Markb. — 23 Jul 2008

It's hard to pinpoint exactly when it was that Mike Myers went over to the dark side, but it happened long before The Cat in the Hat. Most likely it occurred during the first 10 minutes of Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me, when Myers, wanting to make his shagadelic superspy a free agent again, betrays Elizabeth Hurley, the surprisingly believable (and endearing) romantic interest from the original AP: International Man of Mystery, as well as all sense of continuity and logic by writing Hurley out of the series permanently, in just about the laziest and most perfunctory way possible.

(Uh, what evidence was there in the original that Mimi Rogers gave birth to a fembot?) This marked the complete sacrifice of the sweetness and heart in Myers' movies in favor of increasingly gross and juvenile gags replete with Myers replacing wit with elaborate makeup stunts that don't exactly cause Rick Baker too many sleepless nights.

In short, while Man of Mystery was filled with Myers' affection for James Bond, Matt Helm, Derek Flint, Burt Bachrach and 1960s British pop culture, the two sequels feature Myers' affection for nobody and nothing save Myers.

Austin Powers is gone, baby, gone, but Myers' self-indulgent egomania lives on in the relentlessly puerile and painful The Love Guru, the least of whose sins is Myers' refusal to make his central character (an Indian spiritual teacher who contradicts his philosophies by being obsessed with materialism and one-upping Deepak Chopra) an object of even the most obvious satire; such is Myers' preening desire to have the audience love him, which results in one of the most preening, obnoxiously camera-hogging performances in recent movie history.

("Couldn't you just eat me up?" Myers asks. "Yes, and then puke you right back out," we reply.) The jokes themselves are so endlessly, assaultively crass and prepubescent (which can be forgivable, if they're funny) that even Myers' fellow Canadians Terrence and Philip would launch a protest campaign.

Marco Schnabel's direction is so amateurish that viewers really come to appreciate Jay Roach's expert staging of even the flimsiest material in the Powers trilogy. Concerning the performances, when JESSICA ALBA comes across the best in a movie, you know it's in trouble; she's no actress by anybody's standards (except maybe her immediate family's) but as the unlucky owner of a hockey team whose star player is counseled by the hero, Alba is certainly pleasant, natural, and has an extremely winning smile--fortunately, due to Schnabel's ping-pong camera placement in her scenes with Myers, you at least get to see it exactly 50% of the time! Alba's costars don't come across quite so well, to say the least; as Myers' cross-eyed mentor, Sir Ben Kingsley (The Wackness) not only puts Sir Laurence Olivier's late career Polaroid commercials and The Jazz Singer in their proper perspective, but proves that it's possible to sink lower in one's career than working for director Uwe Boll.

Stephen Colbert, playing a drug-addled sportscaster, cause moviegoers to seriously question the intelligence, slyness and wit he regularly brings to Comedy Central's The Colbert Report.