Greetings and welcome back to Raspberry Picking, where we look back at Golden Raspberry Award winners and nominees and decide whether they really deserve to be called the worst movies of all time. This month we’re off to Canada with The Love Guru, nominee for seven Razzies, winner of three including Worst Picture, and banisher of Mike Myers back to the bowels of perpetual adolescence whence he came.
In this month’s episode of Formerly Beloved Actors Who Outstayed Their Welcomes, let us turn to Mr. Mike Myers.
No no, the less funny one.
Okay, that was unkind. The Canadian former standup did, in fact, act in a few comedies that were funny. After several seasons on Saturday Night Live, he and SNL castmate Dana Carvey turned one of their sketches into the 1992 stoner-comedy megahit Wayne’s World (1992). He followed this up with the Austin Powers and Shrek films, which remain two of the most successful comedy franchises of all time. But somewhere along the line, Myers seems to have lost his touch.
Right around this point.
That is, if you believe he ever really had his touch. We’ve established in previous iterations of this column that “grown men acting like gross caricatures of teenage boys” is not my preferred brand of comedy, and that brand is pretty much the air Myers breathes. If he were here inside this column, he would no doubt make a juvenile crack about who exactly was having his touch, snicker in that beaverlike way of his, and then mug around expectantly waiting for the rest of us to join in. I suppose it’s to Myers’s credit that I’m perpetually one unfunny joke, grating laugh, or ugly mug away from attempting to punch him through my TV screen: for a long time, he was very good at this brand of comedy that I hate.
Then he did The Cat in the Hat (2003), an outrageously cynical (and outrageously horny) adaptation of a beloved guileless children’s literary classic, and the world started to look at him a bit funny. And then, after pacifying everyone with a couple of blockbusting Shrek sequels, he made The Love Guru.
That doesn’t even work as a dick joke! How does “karma” work as a stand-in for the male sex organ? How can karma be large or small? You can’t stop trying before you’ve left the poster!
The Love Guru was supposed to replicate Myers’s earlier successes with Wayne Campbell and Austin Powers. Like those two, Guru Pitka was a character Mike Myers had developed during his stand-up-and-sketch career. Like those two, Guru Pitka was supposed to be a fond parody of something Myers actually loved and respected – in this case, the self-help empire of his “spiritual advisor” Deepak Chopra. Like those two, Guru Pitka was considered a sure bet for a successful franchise.
Unlike those two, audiences, when presented with the concept, did not play along.
The Love Guru went down hard on its opening weekend, grossing only $13 million and opening in 4th place. It ended up bringing in $40 million against its $62 million budget. Its director, first-timer Mario Schnabel, never directed another feature and doesn’t even have a Wikipedia page. And Mike Myers never bounced back. He never wrote another film, and his starring roles dried up throughout the 2010s. Today, he has mostly retired from acting, though he occasionally and to little fanfare hints at the possibility of an Austin Powers 4.
Now, we’ve seen a lot of career–killers here at Raspberry Picking. Sometimes, for whatever reason, the world just tires of a director or performer. Sometimes it really was time for the artist to go, and sometimes the death was premature. Which of these was The Love Guru?
THE STORY
And sometimes, the death is a mercy killing. If The Love Guru was Mike Myers’s great new idea back in 2008, better to disavow him instantly of the notion that he was having great ideas.
We open the film in the small Indian town of Harenmahkeesta (get it, hair in my keister) with a voiceover by Morgan Freeman (Morgan Freeman). Wait, it’s actually a voiceover from Guru Maurice Pitka (Myers), who is speaking into a voice recorder with a Morgan Freeman setting. The movie will not again reach these heights of cleverness.
Every time he touches it, I want to take a shower.
Myers is wearing a wig and beard made of a yak’s pubic hair, a fake schnozz that appears to have been the inspiration for Bradley Cooper’s makeup in Maestro, and an accent that has not emerged from the mouth of a human being before or since. “Canadian inflected with Hank Azaria on potent weed” is the best I got. Anyway, Guru Pitka is telling us all about “intimacy, or ‘into-me-I-see,’” and to illustrate his understanding of “intimacy,” he’s going to tell us about Darren Roanoke (Romany Malco), his toughest student in the ways of love.
Then we transition to the opening credits. Mike Myers rides an elephant and commits sexual assault against Dolly Parton’s “9 to 5.”
Now we can start the story proper, and it will quickly make us wish we could go back to the elephant and “9 to 5.” A pair of hockey commentators (Jim Gaffigan and Stephen Colbert – there are so many celebrities debasing themselves in this movie) tell us how Darren Roanoke was the hot new player for the beleaguered Toronto Maple Leafs until he split up with his wife Prudence (Meagan Good), who is now dating the LA Kings’ French-Canadian goalie Jacques “Le Coq” (get it, because it means the cock) Grande (Justin Timberlake). Because I respect your intellect far more than Mike Myers does, I will simply let you figure out why Jacques Grande is nicknamed “Le Coq.”
I believe in you and your powers of deduction.
Anyway, the knowledge that his wife is getting with Le Coq gives Darren a bad case of the mad-sads, so he’s been thrown off his game and the Leafs are looking good to lose the Stanley Cup yet again. This is deeply upsetting to Jane Bullard (Jessica Alba), the owner of the Leafs. Her father bought the team in 1967, they haven’t won a Stanley Cup since, and now their fans talk about the “Bullard curse.” So Jane really needs Darren back on his game. And Jane is a big fan of the sage wisdom, on all matters of life, of Guru Pitka.
Pitka, in the meantime, is having his own minor meltdown: he’s tired of being the number-two Neo-Eastern-Self-Help-Spiritualist in the world and losing potential rich clients to number one, Deepak Chopra (Deepak Chopra). With the help of his manager, Dick Pants (John Oliver, about fifteen years old) and his assistant Rajneesh (Manu Nayaran), he determines that his problem is that he’s never been on Oprah. But, if he can fix Darren Roanoke’s marriage, he’ll get an interview with Oprah, and then all his problems will be gone!
We then head into a flashback to Pitka’s childhood training in India, where he and Chopra were both students of Guru Tugginmypuddha (Ben Kingsley) (really) and oh my HOLY JESUS WHAT IS THAT.
I HAD TO SEE THIS SO NOW YOU DO TOO.
What you see before you is merely the image of an image, the faintest shadow of Satan’s buttocks as he wiggles them at the camera. I hate this more than I have ever hated anything in my life. I hate it more than anything I saw in Freddy Got Fingered or Dirty Love. I hate it more than the Hatfields hated the McCoys, more than Bette hated Joan, more than Don McLean hated Mick Jagger. I hate it more than I hate American cheese, stomach viruses, mosquitoes, Florida drivers, or pointless meetings where an overpaid consultant reads PowerPoint slides about the newest education fad for three hours. The only thing I hate more than I hate this is the scene in which Academy Award winner Ben Kingsley pisses into a vase and then forces his acolytes to play a game of “Stink Mop” with it while he farts at us.
Tugginmypuddha (get it, because tuggin’ my wait does anyone actually call it that?) asks this horrifying half-man abomination why it wants to be a guru, and Pitka responds that he wants girls to like him. So Tugginm…Ben Kingsley forces him to wear a chastity belt shaped like an elephant, so that he will learn to gain satisfaction from within, rather than from the affections of others.
The rest of the movie is Pitka trying to get Darren and Prudence back together while Myers makes embarrassing jokes about male genitalia and everyone around him pretends to find them funny so, uh, I guess let’s start officially talking about the bad stuff.
THE BAD
You know how the (incorrect) defenders of Freddy Got Fingered will always claim that it’s actually some genius experiment in “anti-comedy,” Tom Green pulling a prank on an audience and a studio that was expecting to laugh at fart and sex jokes? The Love Guru also feels like a movie made as a prank, or perhaps as a dare, if the dare was “make the movie Freddy Got Fingered is congratulating itself for not being.”
Here is the basic progression of nearly every plot beat in The Love Guru:
- Guru Pitka and one of his companions (Malco, Oliver, Narayan, or Alba, in ascending order of how much they hate themselves for being here) find themselves in an awkward situation – for example, Pitka has accidentally insulted the 2’8” Maple Leafs Coach Punch Cherkov (get it, because no I’m not doing it again).
- In a best-case scenario, Pitka says something unfunny and gross like “I think I’m gonna have to do a panty check. I might have some monkey-mustard back there.”
- In a worse-case scenario, Pitka says something that would be horribly offensive if I could muster the energy to feel offense, which I can’t, because I’ve spent all my energy hating Mike Myers for describing his feces as “monkey-mustard.” For example, looking down at Coach Cherkov and saying, with great relish, “Condescending! That’s a biiiig word for you!”
- In an even WORSE-case scenario, Myers will turn directly to the camera and explain a joke he just told. For example, “I’m sorry, I didn’t catch your gnome. Name! You are a midget!”
- Pitka will crack up at his own joke, while his companion or companions silently calculate the size of the Xanax prescription they will be needing.
Jessica Alba and Manu Narayan, wondering how hard it is to become a certified public accountant.
Seriously, everyone – except Mike Myers, who looks quite perky and chipper throughout this whole sorry exercise, and Justin Timberlake, who is best in show without competition – looks like they’re considering calling in a bomb threat. Jessica Alba especially, who is called upon to do nothing but frown poutily at angry Toronto fans and smile shmoopily at Myers, looks exhausted and dissociated throughout the movie.
As for Myers, it’s not enough for him to do the horrible thing, he always has to point out the horrible thing he is doing. “I’m making diarrhea noises with my cup,” he will announce as he makes diarrhea noises with his cup. Or, in a less objectionable but somehow more offensive example, “I’d like an alligator soup, and make it snappy! Because alligators are snappy, and at the same time, I want it prompt.” At some point, I expect him to turn his stupid grin to the camera and announce, “I am making this movie because I hate you and want to watch the world burn.” And every time he does this, he emits a particular…laugh? The best description I have for it is “the sound a dog makes right before it vomits up a large lizard,” a kind of choked guttural wheeze. It’s as good an indicator as we have of when the movie thinks it is being funny. The other main indicator is when Myers forces his costars to laugh at his jokes, which I assume he did by attaching electrodes to their groins.
You have two seconds, Manu; then we turn up the voltage.
So, so few of these jokes land. Pitka’s use of “Mariska Hargitay” as a mantra is more puzzling than funny, and only becomes more so when Hargitay herself shows up in a scene loaded with C-list celebrity cameos. Ben Kingsley’s wretched Gandhi parody feels like the result of a lost bet. A subplot involving Roanoke’s mommy issues takes up an extraordinary amount of time and goes nowhere. There’s nothing for me to latch onto. I would feel a little bad about being so mean to this movie, because Myers clearly believed in it and thought people would like it, but you know what, it was mean to me first.
If being repulsive and irritating weren’t enough, the film is also lazy. It’s a shame that Mario Schnabel’s career kicked the bucket so hard and so decisively, but perhaps he just wasn’t meant to direct movies, because he simply didn’t know what he was doing. A conversation between Pitka and Roanoke supposedly at Niagara Falls is obviously greenscreened over the same ten-second loop, and the two suddenly switch from being on the American side of the Falls to the Canadian side midway through their heart-to-heart. A scene in which two elephants have sex in a hockey rink as a distraction (yes, that happens) looks ugly and half-finished even by 2008 standards.
And speaking of Freddy Got Fingered, it’s also the second Raspberry Picking movie that has forced me to think at length about the sexual proclivities of elephants.
This attack rooster that tries to scratch Pitka to death is the real hero of the movie.
THE GOOD
The good moments of The Love Guru are few and far between, but they do exist. This won’t take long:
As much as I hate everything he is doing, I can’t be entirely mad at Mike Myers for having a good time with a project he’s enjoying. He can, in fact, sing, so some of his Bollywood-styled pop song renditions do sound pretty good. Justin Timberlake, too, is having a heck of a lot of fun in a role for which the primary demand is that he swagger around pretending to have an impossibly enormous penis. Not a hard job (get it), but at least he does it well.
Stephen Colbert as a drug-addled hockey commentator gets one good joke making fun of sponsored Moments in Sports, declaring a Kings player’s sudden attack on Roanoke “the Altoids ‘Curiously Strong Elbow to the Face’ of the Game.” I smiled at that.
Production designer Charles Wood gave us one incredible set in Coach Cherkov’s office:
Film the whole movie in here. Make them share our pain.
Finally, the very end – a Bollywood-style big-group rendition of Steve Miller’s “The Joker” – is honestly pretty good. Costume designer Karen Patch had already done fine work on Pitka, dressing him in a mustard-yellow angrakha that fits his sunny, grinning excess all too well, and she put together an ensemble for this final number that is both sexy and tasteful, two things otherwise missing from The Love Guru.
Jessica Alba, contemplating her eventual revenge on the world.
The credits also contain a single blooper. A camera guy says “all I see is asses,” and without missing a beat, Verne Troyer says “now you know how it feels.” I laughed, a real joyous laugh, a treasure more precious than diamonds after the longest, most laugh-free 87 minutes of my movie-viewing life. Seriously, I think I smiled more during Grave of the Fireflies.
Look, people, the point of this column is emphatically not to take a big old dump all over movies upon which everyone has already taken a big old dump. I want to like these movies! I want to stick up for them! Writing 2500 words on the topic of “guess what, this bad movie is real bad” just feels unsporting.
But sometimes a movie is just asking for it. The Love Guru and I are mortal enemies now. Feeling this kind of hatred for a movie is refreshing, even inspiring. I am energized like I would never be after yawning through the two-and-a-half hours of navel-gazing mediocrity that seem to make up so many of today’s movies. I feel alive. I feel ready to run out and scream and punch things. My love for movies has grown because I hated this movie so much.
So thank you, Mike Myers. You have reminded me of the joy of the movies. Please never do it again.
Quality of Movie: 1 / 5. As long as Ghosts Can’t Do It exists, nothing shot with a bare minimum of competence can go lower than 1.
Quality of Experience: ½ / 5. 87 minutes of botched dental surgery would have at least varied its pain level from time to time.
Did the Razzies Get It Right? Lord, I hope so, but my goodness what a wretched list of films. Of the Worst Picture nominees that year, I have seen The Happening, which is fun-bad; Disaster Movie, which is bad-bad but not as bad as The Love Guru; and In the Name of the King, which is goofy and sincere but mostly a big ol’ snooze. I have not seen The Hottie and the Nottie and do not plan to change this in the near or distant future.
You can read Tim’s review of The Love Guru here!
Want to pick more Raspberries? Check out the rest of the columns in this series!
Mandy Albert teaches high school English and watches movies – mostly bad, occasionally good – in the psychedelic swamplands of South Florida. She is especially fond of 1970s horror and high-sincerity, low-talent vanity projects. You can listen to her and her husband talk about Star Trek: Enterprise on their podcast At Least There’s a Dog! You can also follow Mandy on Letterboxd.