The best moment in THE LOVE GURU is right at the beginning. It’s when Stephen Colbert first appears as a deranged sports commentator. Cling to that moment, because even when he pops up again, it won’t be the same. It will be after this revolting excrescence in which he is appearing has infected your eyes and your psyche. Not there there isn’t food for thought here. What, for example, is the karmic debt Deepak Chopra that is paying by appearing in this film as himself? Or Ben Kingsley’s, who appears as a cross-eyed caricature of guru-dom overseeing a training exercise that can truly be described as a pissing match.
The perpetrator is Mike Myers, who as Guru Pitka is a long way from his glory days as Austin Powers, and after that franchise self-destructed, the glory isn’t what it used to be. Mixing Indian mysticism and big league hockey, he has confused high concept with cleverness. The entire film is an endless stream of jokes about bodily functions and the parts that make them possible, punctuated with jokes about shortness aimed at perpetual Myers sidekick, Verne Troyer. The plot on which all this hinges has Pitka imported from India to Toronto by the cursed owner of that city’s hockey team, played by Jessica Alba, and tasked with restoring its star player to the top of his game. Which makes one ponder why Alba is taking parts in so many gosh-awful films, GOOD LUCK CHUCK, comes to mind.
Aside from Colbert, there are exactly two funny things in the 88 minutes of running time. One involves an attack chicken, which is funny only because it lays into Pitka thereby fulfilling the dearest wish of the entire audience. The other is Justin Timberlake as a Quebecoise goalie with an extra helping of manhood breaking into a Celine Dion song, and that’s more peculiar funny than ha ha funny.
The whole is written as though it had been tossed off rink-side in the first ten minutes after the author had been hit in the head with a puck. Hard. Further, it’s realized with all the finesse of a Saturday Night Live sketch thrown on the air at the last minute and slotted for the spot just before the sign-off, with Meyers mugging for the camera with the same grinning self-satisfaction that a three-year-old exhibits when it figures out that saying the naughty word it has just learned upsets the adults. He drives the non-jokes into the ground by keeping them going until the mind itself just shuts down in self-defense. To say that this is aimed at the lowest common denominator is to give it way, way too much credit. To say that Myers can’t get any lower than THE LOVE GURU is just wishful thinking. Very wishful.
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