Camden Movies: The Love Guru | Marco Schnabel

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The Review - AT THE MOVIES with DAN CARRIER
Published: 31 July 2008

Mike Myers as the Love Guru

Love affair with Myers is on wane

THE LOVE GURU
Directed by Marco Schnabel
Certificate 12a

IT’S a shame that Mike Myers got involved with this simple and ineffective comedy. His puerile humour occasionally works.
But by dragging this story through production and plonking it on our screens, Myers has fundamentally lost his mojo. It’s a shame: in the past, he created silly comedies you were not embarrassed to say you enjoyed. Now he seems to have reached the kind of Ben Stiller/Adam Sandler levels of humour, and it’s a loss to those of us who like a bit of teenage banter.
Myers is the charlatan sex therapist Pitka, who returns to America after a childhood in India to become a famed self-help guru. He starts by trying to solve the thorny problem of a sports star whose wife has left him for another jock while chasing a dream of appearing on Oprah.
The only thing remotely funny is the barbs at the American self-improvement obsessions: one joke about the difference of feeling you are “nowhere” instead of “now here” works. But that’s it.
Then there is Myers’ constant, silent soliquys: after cracking a poor gag, he looks at the camera as if to say, “Geddit?”. Er, yes, Mike, we do, but it’s just not funny.
Other jokes rely heavily on stupid names, lame catchphrases, elephant sex and a couple of painful songs: renditions of Dolly Parton’s Nine to Five and Steve Miller’s Space Cowboy, played on the sitar, go on for an awfully long time. Pitka has no charm. Austin Powers he is not. You’ll dislike him, even after his moment of redemption at the end.

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