Jun. 25, 2008 - Issue #662: Eamon McGrath Releases the Wild Dogs

Film Capsules - The Love Guru

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The Love Guru

Directed by Marco Schnabel

Written by Mike Myers, Graham Gordy

Starring Myers, Jessica Alba, Justin Timberlake

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Mike Myers gets a small, but fair kudos from me for resisting all temptations of making another Austin Powers movie. It seemed that with every installment, the franchise was becoming decreasingly funny  and increasingly perfunctory. However, what he does with The Love Guru is pick up from the same spot where the mediocrity had last been abandoned. Now, instead of a story built around a set of dick jokes told by a shag-errific British spy, you have a story built around a set of dick jokes told by a shag-errific Indian spiritual guide.
 

Guru Pitka (Myers) is one of the world’s best “neo-Eastern, self-help specialists,” second only to Deepak Chopra, who, like so many celebrities on Myers’ Facebook friends’ list, makes a cameo. Pitka is hired by the Toronto Maple Leafs to help mend the marriage of their star player, Darren Roanoke (Romany Malco). I have to admit this invokes the Canadian in me who feels like he’s been a movie extra his whole life and just got a starring role. Best of all, there are no lame Canadian jokes. Well, sort of. There are no lame Anglo-Canadian jokes; Jacques “Le Cock” Grande (Justin Timberlake)—the thief of Roanoke’s wife—is a horribly pegged French-Canadian, with both a weak accent and a weak antagonism. If he’s The Love Guru’s Dr Evil, then Dr Evil was about as bad as a bonobo.
 

Luckily (but not really) Myers and co-writer Graham Gordy rely on other easily-resolved conflicts like Roanoke’s dysfunctional relationship with his mother, the Stanley Cup finals between two teams that would never realistically make it there (the Maple Leafs and Kings), Pitka’s evolving love story with Maple Leafs owner Jane Bullard (Jessica Alba) and the chastity underwear, removable only when he finds self-love, preventing him from consummating their love.

The Love Guru is sometimes funny because Myers is a genuinely funny guy—sometimes. He just gets carried away with his jokes, like that annoying kid in elementary school who’s capable of making the class laugh but doesn’t know when to stop. Worse than that, Myers and his character Pitka think its hilarious to explain their jokes. So between telling them, telling them again and again, and then explaining the same joke, that leaves hardly any time to tell the story. Which is fine, I guess, since there’s not much of a story to tell. V 

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