One of the reasons Mike Myers takes so long to commit his new comedy creations to celluloid (it’s been six fallow years since Austin Powers’ last shag) is because he hates to air them without first performing them before a series of live audiences. This suggests a worthy diligence, an admirable concern to craft bespoke funnybone-ticklers, rather than taking the ‘crank ’em out and hope for more hits than misses’ approach of Myers’ more prolific contemporaries (hello, Will Ferrell). Sadly, The Love Guru proves this M.O. doesn’t always work. Indeed, going by this garish, desperate laugh-necropolis, you’d be forgiven for thinking that the only audience Myers tested his New Age idiot Pitka on was his own self-satisfied reflection.
The character, and by extension the film, is a disaster. Pitka ineptly combines all of Myers’ previous creations’ hoariest elements with cultural references that’ll be meaningless to anyone unfamiliar with that dubious growth-industry that’s based on insecure Westerners’ demand for spiritual massages by enterprising Easterners. It’s not even like the movie makes any satirical jabs at this business; in fact, it’s almost entirely apologistic, Pitka being the result of Myers’ own admitted appreciation of real-life guru Deepak Chopra’s scribing.
It doesn’t take much scrutiny to spot that Pitka is little more than Wayne with a long beard or Austin Powers with a big nose rather than buck-teeth. Beyond the soft, lilty voice and childish advice-acronyms, it’s all the same schtick, delivered by yet another supposedly charming idiot who’s inexplicably instantly attractive to the token totty (Jessica Alba, tragically unaware that Myers is making her perform the comedic equivalent of walking through rancid tripe) and the first to laugh at his own jokes - unconvincingly, it must be added.
Wordplay doesn’t get any more playful than someone mistakenly thinking Pitka’s just called them a “cunt” (that’s how he pronounced “can’t”); the slapstick involves abusing former Mini-Me Verne Troyer (again); for gross-out we have scenes involving boogers and wee-wee; and at one point, Pitka actually dares to utter the following unterquip: “Get me a crocodile soup... And make it snappy!” Yes, it really is that dire.
