Such An Embarrassment of Non-Riches

Rating: 1/10 (24 January 2009)

I'm glad I wasn't in the UK's Celebrity Big Brother House this year. Not because I wouldn't have enjoyed meeting some of the others, but because at one stage fellow house mate Verne Troyer might have asked me about the last film he did with his best friend, and I wouldn't be comfortable lying to him and denying that I thought The Love Guru was a cinematic mutant mistakenly allowed to live and breathe rather than be put to a merciful sleep in the development stage.
Hey, I like Mike Myers. He has a measure of talent and charisma and likability, and I applaud his deserved financial and critical success with the Wayne's World and Austin Powers films (though he went one movie too far with Goldmember). Having said that, Myers, like his fellow SNL alumnus Will Ferrell, is like a kid wandering about a shop eating food off the shelves and generally behaving like someone in desperate need of supervision and guidance. Let's be honest, Ferrell's last decent leading role was in Anchorman (2004), and while he's been fine in supporting work like The Producers (2005), everything else that he's had a hand in has been a series of embarrassments of varying levels. And sadly, Myers can too easily fall into the same degree of arrested development.
People who know me know that I may go on about a lot of bad movies, but more often than not, I enjoyed watching them, and perversely can watch them again. This one, however, I'm ashamed that I ever wasted bandwidth getting it, let alone consider watching it again.
Myers' characters have always been one-note, with a limited appeal. But his latest Guru Pitka went too far when he thought of writing it down; in comparison, his Beatnik poet Charlie from So I Married An Axe Murderer (1993) was a character of multi-layered nuance, and more importantly, one that people would much rather watch. The very concept should have been seen as potentially execrable and insulting to Hindus. Yes, I know he tries to get around this in the movie by claiming that Pitka wasn't really a Hindu, but an American raised by Hindus, but like so much else in this movie, that attempt fails miserably given what passes for humor.
Hey, I like Dumb Humor  when it's done right. Dodgeball, Epic Movie, Jay and Silent Bob. But the gags in The Love Guru come in three flavors: racist, gross and infantile, and in various mixtures thereof. The racist names he came up with (Harenmahkeester, Satchabigknoba) is the sort of thing an ignorant ten-year-old kid would come up with to make the other ignorant ten-year-old kids in the playground laugh. Yes, isn't it hilarious that Indian people all have big long names? The rest of the atrocity is filled with other dodgy names like Coach Cherkov and Dick Pants, as well as alleged jokes about snot balls and nose hairs, humping elephants, food prepared to look like genitals, and buckets of urine  all of which probably would have sounded funny in 1988 in the writers' brainstorming sessions in the SNL offices at 3am when you're doped up on caffeine, but I honestly can't believe that a 45-year-old man wrote this crap down in 2008 and thought this would be funny in any other circumstances.
And the execution of these so-called gags is almost consistently accompanied by Myers with the same sort of mugging grin to the camera that he perfected with Wayne Campbell and Austin Powers  the difference here being that those other characters had moments where they really were humorous, but seeing Myers try it with Pitka is akin to watching an inept magician fail every trick, but still take a rehearsed bow after each one, oblivious to the negative reaction he's getting from his audience. And worse, he drives the jokes so deep into the ground, again and again, you expect them to bump into Hilary Swank piloting her subterranean machine around the Earth's Core.
And the storyline carrying these non-gags, like the sores on the back of a leper, is just as awful: a guru seeking fame and a spot on Oprah counsels a Canadian hockey player who wants to win back his wife from a rival, Jacques "Le Coq" Grande, who apparently is well-endowed (Get it? Le Coq Grande?). Another lesson to learn, Mike: Sports Themes Aren't Funny. Canadian Sports Themes Aren't Funny, Cubed. It may give you the chance to hang about with your heroes, but it's a waste of time for the rest of us. Some have tried to point out the satire in Pitka's self-help philosophies, but satire only works when it makes a point, and doesn't just appear indistinguishable from the targets it's allegedly satirizing.
In case I haven't made it clear, this is a Bad Film. Not So Bad It's Good, like The Oxford Murders (2008). This is embarrassing on levels I haven't seen in ages. Some bad movies have people in it who can rise above the mediocrity, but this one is like quicksand, sucking people down and suffocating them. And I'm not talking about the likes of Verne Troyer, Jessica Alba and Justin Timberlake, who were basically employees who probably needed the money, or the cameos from Oprah and Val Kilmer. I'm talking about Ben F**king Kingsley.
How does a respected Oscar winner go from playing Gandhi to playing Guru Tugginmypudha?