'THE Love Guru" is even funnier than "Wayne's World" or "Austin Powers." Not. If this movie were a president, it would be Tedious Roosevelt.
Mike Myers' titular figure, a wannabe Deepak Chopra, is like one of those (98 percent of) "Saturday Night Live" characters not interesting enough to make a movie around. The pitch meeting must have been brief. "It's about this Eastern spiritual dude who writes self-help books with goofy titles." "OK . . . And?" "And, um, he gets various kinds of food stuck in his beard?" "OK . . . And?" "And we'll fill it out with lots of crotch jokes and people getting hit in the head with stuff." "You're a genius!"
Myers, who stars as Guru Pitka, a Hollywood sage, also co-wrote the script. It's a thrift-store hodgepodge of one-liners you last heard around the monkey bars in fourth grade ("I'd like an alligator soup and make it snappy"), goofs on Indian-sounding names (Ben Kingsley plays his teacher, Guru Tugginmypudha) and dull self-help acronyms (GURU: "Gee, You Are You").
Pitka is called in by the owner of the Toronto Maple Leafs (Jessica Alba, who is to acting what Dame Judi Dench is to sex) to help a star player (Romany Malco, the hilarious black guy from "The 40-Year-Old Virgin") who has lost his skills since his wife ran off with a French Canadian goalie (Justin Timberlake, with Gabe Kaplan grooming).
. . . there are jokes like, "What's the capital of Thailand?" "Bangkok!" followed by a crotch punch, a meal that looks like male mating equipment, and the guru saying of a corn dog, "Is this a dog's thingy?" Also there's a fight involving mops soaked in urine and a no-reason-for-this barroom brawl, which concludes with a pool cue up the guru's bottom. So he takes it out and sniffs it.
. . . As always in sports comedies, there are a couple of wacky announcers (Stephen Colbert, Jim Gaffigan), and as usual they try way too hard. Their routine is so brainless that it's hard to picture anyone enjoying it except those in the same IQ bracket as actual hockey fans, who would probably be equally entertained by an evening spent at home holding a Bic lighter up to their own bursts of flatulence.
Mini-Me, Verne Troyer, is on hand as the team's coach, but solely so Guru Pitka can reel off some midget jokes last heard in 1974 in the Copa Room of the Sands. This movie is so feeble that the gag reel at the end consists of one gag - which is better than almost all of the jokes in the film proper. At 88 minutes, "The Love Guru" would have benefited from a trim of roughly 80 minutes. Call it The Audience Cut.
Comparing the comedy in this film and that of "Get Smart" . . . is like asking whether Hamas or Hezbollah puts on a nicer Easter parade.
I'd like to thank Mike Myers, for providing the critics with such rich material, and inspiring them to such eloquence!
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