Taking a few well-aimed jabs at burgeoning self-help megabucks hustles while dragging down gross-out comedy to a new low, The Love Guru and its split personality could use a little self-help mending of its own. With stinging satire in odd alternating missed opportunity co-existence with yucky body cavity jokes and literal gagging gags, the movie and its disorienting mood swings seem to have by-passed the cutting room floor.
Mike Myers is Guru Pitka, the Indian mischief maker advice maven in question. Tutored since boyhood by the cross-eyed Guru Tugginmypudha (Ben Kingsley) who pours tea through his nostrils and uses urine-drenched mops to dispense pre-syphilitic words of wisdom, don’t ask, Pitka has spent his life in chastity belt restraints. That is, until such time as he attains enlightenment through self-love and has therefore earned the right to chase chicks. At the same time, Pitka endures being the number two guy on the self-help totem pole, as humiliating second fiddle to the unchallenged answer man, Deepak Chopra.
Summoned on assignment to sort out the marriage problems of Toronto Maple Leaf star player Darren Roanoke (Romany Malco), who is sending the team into a losing streak in his current depressed state of mind, Pitka is unable to resist tugging on that lust leash he’s been wearing forever, when he catches sight of fetching Maple Leaf owner, Jane (Jessica Alba). But Pitka also has to contend with over-endowed loverboy player Jacques Grande (Justin Timberlake) while cock blocking the he-man’s security guard attack rooster, since the jock is making a play for Darren’s wife Prudence (Meagan Good) and is currently shacked up with her.
Equally giddy about body orifice and genital jokes, along with talking dirty lewd homonym obsessions morphing into frequent bad grammar, Myers is like a kid let loose in a sex toy store, with novice director Marco Schnabel basically doing the over-permissive parenting thing. Though the bad boy horny guru does deserve points for his accomplished driving skills, and how he handles navigating around the house on mobile carpets, or atop a pachyderm, bronco style, during elephant sex.
And a visit to Coach Cherkov’s (Mini-Me Verne Troyer) miniature office, by all those vertically challenged for a change characters, isn’t half bad either. Though as far as bad taste goes when it comes to Hindu subject matter, the mockery is pretty much equal opportunity, except for the midgets bearing the brunt of it.
Paramount Home Entertainment
Rated PG-13
2 1/2 stars
DVD Features: Deleted Scenes, Extended Scenes; Digital Copy Of The Film; Featurettes: Mike Myers and The Love Guru: An Inside Look; One Helluva Elephant; Hockey Training for Actors; Back in the Booth with Trent and Jay; Outtakes; Bloopers.
