Even Meyers doesn't get the Joke

Rating: 3/10 (3 July 2008)

Apparently even Mike Meyers didn't understand the fluky success of the Austin Powers movies. This is because he has now tried to impose the kind of crude, hoary and often outright juvenile and bad jokes that worked in those films onto a new character. What Meyer's doesn't seem to understand is that what made the Powers movies as enjoyable as they were was that the fact the jokes the Austin Powers character spouted were dumb and in bad taste was much more funny that the actual jokes themselves. In other words, we were all laughing at how incredibly and sublimely stupid most of the jokes were, not at the jokes themselves. Powers was a clueless character who was stupid and emotional arrested enough to think that what he was saying and doing was clever and funnyhe was funny because he was so pathetic yet so joyful about it. Powers was the perfect character for the type of humor Myers used in those films. But the formula just doesn't translate to The Love Guru. Without the proper context, the dick and feces jokes seem imposed on the story instead of being part of the whole concept. Meyers seems to have forgotten that we were very definitely laughing AT Austin Powers, yet he seems to want us to laugh WITH the guru Pitka.