Cast: Mike Myers, Jessica Alba

Director: Marco Schnabel

Screenplay: Mike Myers

Running time: 1 hr 30 mins

Genre: Comedy



CRITIQUE:


The last time we’ve checked, a Hollywood comedy mogul wasted bucks on nonsense, cheap laughs in the form of YOU DON’T MESS WITH THE ZOHAN. Adam Sandler was wasting words and spit on that one. Now, another comedy tycoon is about to face the effect of the laws of diminishing returns. After his Austin Powers skit and his Shrek outings (the third Shrek was a pitfall), here he devises another character but making it perhaps inadvertently the same as the raunchy spy he played but only with facial hair and wearing a rather orangey Indian outfit. His name is Guru Pitka, and after viewing this film, you don’t want to know anything about him anymore.


Even ZOHAN and NORBIT has a plot, but GURU plods like its elephants, never knowing where it’s heading. Fart, racial, penis, sex gags are thrown in to supposedly enliven the very dry and juiceless script – but they never work, and instead only compares to those spoof movies out there, only that this is not a spoof film. It parodies itself, and the result is a butt-numbing, jaw-clenching mess. The laughs you hear is as dry as your nearest desert, and as shallow as your paddling pond, and the ironically for an Indian-accented movie, the only thing that proved amusing was the Guru’s acronym-definition of the Bible.


Jessica Alba and Justin Timberlake co-stars but seemed like they’re just employed as stand-ins, whose characters are as flimsy as cardboard sheets, like those character stand-ins you see outside cinemas. Alba is dull, even her starpower couldn’t save the downhill-rolling plot development, and Timberlake is misused as the bawdy “La Coq”. On the whole, it seems that what THE LOVE GURU really needs is a script-slash-jokes guru.



VERDICT:

Crass, turgid and absolutely unfunny – 15 minutes after the movie, you’ll never remember anything except for Mike Myers’ penchant for sex-and-genital jokes, which are all very childish. Don’t expect for an Austin Powers trip, or at least a Shrek humour, because THE LOVE GURU is a stinkhole.



RATING: F