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The Love Guru

Review By: Michael Dance
MichaelDance@TheCinemaSource.com

There is no sure way of knowing how funny I'll find The Love Guru a year from now. After all, it's happened with plenty of other movies: the first time I see them, my opinion ranges from disappointed (example: Austin Powers in Goldmember) to mildly bored (example: Anchorman), but then they keep coming up in conversation with my friends, I keep catching parts of them on TV, and the next time I see them, magically, they've become hilarious. The first time I saw Super Troopers, I regarded it with casual indifference; now it's one of my favorite movies.

So I guess that could happen with The Love Guru. It's possible that, after hearing that one friend who loved it quote all the funny parts for months, I'll return to the movie at some point and discover comedy gold that I hadn't noticed the first time.

But I doubt it.

It's not that The Love Guru is terrible. It's not even that it has a bizarrely complicated plot (an American boy is raised in India as a spiritual guru, comes back to L.A. with aspirations of becoming the next Deepak Chopra, and gets a job trying to help a hockey player win back his girlfriend from a rival player in order to get booked on Oprah). It's just that -- well, the previews don't lie: most of the jokes are obviously recycled from the Austin Powers franchise.

And there are lots of penis jokes. And even more frequent than those are midget jokes. Props to Myers for continuing to cast Verne Troyer, because he's a pretty funny guy, but Myers has a pathological need to mock his height. It gets ugly after a while.

Some stuff is funny, absolutely, although for more reliable laughs you'd be better off checking out Get Smart, which the powers that be at Paramount idiotically decided to open The Love Guru against. Ironically, Get Smart is basically a James Bond spoof, which Myers knows a thing or two about after his three Austin Powers movies.

In fact, maybe one of the reasons I regarded The Love Guru with such indifference is that it's harder to pin down than those movies. Spy movie parody? Got it. By contrast, here we get, in no particular order, elements of (a) a hockey movie, (b) a Bollywood spoof, (c) a romantic comedy, (d) a gross-out comedy, and (e) a moralizing self-help movie.

But I'm not just dismissing it for being hard to categorize: all those elements add up to a big, clunky mess. The film jerks from scene to scene with all the grace of a sixteen-year-old in his dad's standard transmission truck, complete with badly-disguised exposition, payoffs without appropriate setups (I'm thinking Jessica Alba's rant at an obnoxious fan) and some amateur technical filmmaking, too. A scene ...