The Love Guru

Directed By: Marco Schnabel
Rating: PG-13 (US) / 14A (Can)
Runtime: 1 hour, 28 min.

We all understand the feeling of the elephant in the room, the one that no one will mention, and yet it’s presence is cripplingly obvious and uncomfortable? While watching Mike Myers latest “The Love Guru” the metaphorical elephant comes to life on screen, while crickets chirp in the theatre.
The story begins with an American-born orphaned son of two missionaries, growing up in India under the tutelage of a cross-eyed guru, alongside the now famous Deepak Chopra. The boy, after undergoing a series of training sequences and donning a chastity belt, turns into His Holiness, The Guru Pitka. Pitka is now the successful owner of his own Ashram, where he gives sutras to B-list celebs, and is second in “the biz” only to Deepak himself. The story begins its climb as Pitka is hired to help the star player of the Toronto Maple Leafs Darren Roanoke, played by Romany Malco, mend his broken relationship with his wife, using his patented DRAMA technique. Jessica Alba plays Jane Bullard, the female owner of the team who is trying to overcome a curse of a long run of Stanley Cup losses. The story follows Pitka through his crazy teachings as he attempts to aide Roanoke back to a healthy marriage, The Leafs to a Stanley Cup, and himself to a fulfillment of his chastity vow, and therefore closer to Jane Bullard.
There is little that I can say positively about this movie. The story is fantastical and completely unrealistic. Albeit those two qualities do not always make an awful movie, however, this film fails to even achieve its purpose of making it’s audience laugh. The only comedy presented in this film was toilet-based for cheap laughs, or anatomy jokes, lacking any ingenuity and giving no credit to the intelligence of the audience. It is clear that Myers was attempting to create an Austin Powers for the next generation, and while the objectionable content remained on par with the Powers movies, the characterization and more importantly, the comedy, fell far short.
Though this movie hints at many spiritual leanings, it does not seem to truly enforce or engage in any. There is no mention of God, or gods, and nothing seems to be worshipped except the concept of learning to love oneself. The Hindu teaching of Dharma is mocked with Pitka’s method of DRAMA, and jabs are aimed at anybody who takes the advice of one man too seriously, as nothing seems to hold any weight.

The majority of the comedy was an attempt to disguise dirty phrases as difficult to pronounce Indian names. Littered with rude and crude dialogue, sexually inappropriate jokes, bathroom humour and tired comedy routines, this movie had very little worth watching, in this reviewers opinion, and the Guru Pitka is welcome to summon $12.00 back into my bank account. I would not recommend this film even to those who are die hard fans of Myers previous classics, as The Love Guru cannot seem to muster the laughs that Power’s effortlessly commanded.