Swompdonkey

The Love Guru: What Went Wrong

If you have the Movie Network, you may recently have gotten a whiff of a rancid comedy while flipping channels and wondered "What is this fetid stinkbomb, and now how do I get this smell off my clothes?"

If the suspicious cinematic toxin featured a mustachioed Justin Timberlake as a quebecois Goalie and a hirsute, profoundly unfunny Mike Myers as an Eastern Mystic, you got Love Guru on yourself. Quick, go take a shower.

Simply put: The Love Guru ain't really that funny. Worse, it is a self-indulgent and tedious flick that actually makes us like and respect Mike Myers less as a comedian for having spawned the character of Guru Pitka and the movie that revolves around him.

It is hard to overstate how badly things went wrong for Myers, a prickly perfectionist who apparently laboured over Pitka, his latest comedic creation, for months and months before "perfecting" it to the point of deeming it worthy to commit to celluloid. The lack of self-awareness on display here is staggering.

This is no indifferent hack we are talking about, after all. Myers must have really thought that Pitka would be a big hit, else he would not have built a movie around him! Remember, this is the guy that refused to give us a "Dieter" movie he could not get behind 100% artistically --in spite of the fact that he had co-written the script, a courageous stand that resulted in a lengthy suit with Universal Studios, and indirectly, the creation of the cinematic abortion The Cat In The Hat, as a by-product of the settlement. Evidently, we can thank Myers for refusing to allow the legacy of "Sprockets" to be defiled a la "Night at the Roxbury".

One of the best deconstructions of the cinematic travesty that is The Love Guru --as well as an examination of the hubris of the man primarily responsible for it-- can be found on the AV Club Web site as an entry in Nathan Rabin's My Year of Flops feature: Kicking A Man While He's Down, Case File #132: The Love Guru. It is a dynamite piece that really cuts to the heart of why and how this movie failed, while marveling at the level of effort Myers put into the creation of this failure. One of my favourite musings from the piece:

A smart, talented, accomplished writer-actor like Myers spending years meticulously creating, rehearsing, and refining an obnoxious one-note cartoon like Guru Pitka is a like a group of brilliant scientists working around the clock for a decade to build a malfunctioning fart machine: a surreal waste of time, energy and manpower.

That's a pretty good example of Rabin's irreverent style. It's also right on the money. I just hope that Mike Myers learns from this fiasco and that this undoubtedly talented man, who after all brought us Wayne Campbell, Austin Powers and Shrek, can bounce back!