The Love Guru Leads Razzie Nominations

I held out on this movie for quite a while because it just looked like a bad idea. At one point in my life, I would have seen just about anything because it had Mike Myers in it. At that point, however, I had only seen So I Married an Axe Murderer and Wayne's World. The Austin Powers trilogy got progressively worse, and in The Love Guru we have a case of a man who's made a lot of money being allowed to do pretty much anything he wants.

So what makes this movie so bad? The premise is absurd: a guru who grew up in Deepak Chopra's shadow is trying to become the most important guru in America by teaching a hockey player who dumped his wife to bang models, then wanted his wife back as soon as a rival hockey player hooked up with her to love. This will get him a spot on Oprah, and, hopefully, win him the team's owner's (Jessica Alba) heart.

Let's talk about the casting. One of the indicators I will be henceforth using to prejudge a film as probably not good will be that Jessica Alba is in it. I have yet to see a movie with her in it where she is any good, and the only movie I've ever seen that was good and had her in it was Sin City. She's just sort of a flat actress, possibly because she is an emotionless android. And in this film, she makes a warbling choking sound I think was meant to be singing. Next, we have Justin Timberlake, who should never, ever, under any circumstances, be allowed to act again. Then Sir Ben Kingsley, who is normally so good in everything, plays a cross-eyed guru who's name is a nod to masturbation. God only knows what kind of scandalous dirt Mike Myers must have on him to have gotten him to do that. And Verne Troyer should only be cast in non-speaking roles. See Bubble Boy if you need more proof.

But the worst of it is Myers himself. His fake Indian accent frequently sounds like Scottish, and the character is poorly constructed. Frankly, I thought that at any moment Deepak Chopra was going to reveal Myers's guru as a fraud. The film's ruby slippers moment is that the elephant motif chastity belt he wears had a snap at the back, so he could have taken it off at any time.

Frankly, there's nothing good about this movie. It's not interesting, smart or funny. It's not well written, well directed or well acted. There's a reason that it got more Razzie award nominations than any other film for 2008. So how painful is this movie to watch? It is as painful as gnawing off both your own legs without anesthetic and hobbling through fields of salt and Tabasco on the raw bloody stumps to escape having to watch it.