It's the Pitkas
Throughout "The Love Guru" Mike Myers delivers a joke, stares at the camera and laughs, it feels desperate, desperately trying to convince us that the joke was funny or Mike Myers desperately trying to convince himself that he can get away with it. For what ever reason Myers' "The Love Guru" is a bad movie, just short of 90 minutes the bad jokes out weigh the good ones and between recycling some gags and relying on penis jokes I can count the funny moments on one hand. And I am not alone because the general consensus is that "The Love Guru" is bad which may explain why it was shown on British TV when only those who can't sleep would tune in.
Guru Pitka (Mike Myers - Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me) much to his annoyance is always playing 2nd fiddle to Deepak Chopra and he is constantly trying to beat his friend and be No. 1 with his current target being to appear on Oprah. Opportunity comes his way when he is hired by an Ice Hockey team as star player Darren Roanoke (Romany Malco) has lost his mojo since his girlfriend Prudence (Meagan Good) dumped him and moved in with Jacques "Le Coq" Grande (Justin Timberlake). Now Pitka must help Darren deal with relationship issues and get his head back in the game in order to with the Stanley cup.
"The Love Guru" may see Mike Myers in a new guise with a different storyline to what he has appeared in before but everything else about the movie is what we have seen before. As such we have some musical numbers, gags about body noises and fluid, funny names and with Verne Troyer in the cast some sizest jokes. It's all very familiar and basically feels like gags from an "Austin Powers" movie slightly re-arranged to work within the idea of an Indian Guru.
Now for some that will be enough, they will like the penis jokes and names full of innuendo whilst Mike Myers laughs at the gag he has just told but for me it all felt rather desperate. As already mentioned the constant mugging to the camera ends up feeling seriously desperate rather than funny but then so do most of the jokes with many are as low as you can go, elephant sex is and never will be funny. And what is lacking is the intelligence, the smartness of the humour which made it funny when Myers gave us Austin Powers, here it just feels like daft gags rushed out in the hope some would be funny.
In truth the most entertaining "The Love Guru" gets is in wondering how some of the actors ended up signing on to appear. You can sort of understand the brief cameos from the likes of Val Kilmer and Jessica Simpson but Jessica Alba and Ben Kingsley in main roles must have been duped into thinking the movie was going to be better than the final product. In the end the most entertaining performance actually comes from Justin Timberlake as Jacques "Le Coq" Grande and that is only because of a funny dance scene involving a Celine Dion song.
What this all boils down to is that "The Love Guru" is seriously bad and even fans of Mike Myers find it desperate and disappointing. Basically in a movie just short of 90 minutes there are a handful of clever gags and then a lot of daftness which never really cracks a smile let alone a laugh.
