It pains me to write that the best line from The Love Guru comes from the gag reel in the closing credits. And from a minor character, too. Poor Verne Troyer, the little actor who gave us Mini Me, he’s standing there waiting to give his lines while the movie’s cinematographer, wrangling with a camera, is trying to fit regular-sized people in a frame with all 32 inches of Troyer. “All I see are butts,” the camera guy says off-screen. Mini Me, without missing a beat: “Now you know how it feels.”
I debated not giving away that line, but I didn’t want to send curious moviegoers — the ones who weren’t shoved away by the shitacular movie trailer — into Love Guru to brave 90 torturous fart-trumpeting, elephant-humping, testicle-crushing minutes to witness one honest line inside the worst movie of the year. And that’s not hyperbole talking — Love Guru is so profoundly toxic we should study it the way scientists study anthrax or tuberculosis or flesh-eating viruses. Here is a wasteland of horrible ideas. You could detonate nukes on this plot and its complexion would improve tenfold. See, there’s Guru Pitka and he can solve the mysteries of the universe using a Gary Busey-approved collection of bizarre acronyms (“BIBLE: Basic Instructions Before Leaving Earth”). He can also convince circus elephants to mate on hockey rinks during the Stanley Cup finals, but that’s neither here nor there.
Pitka is hired by a hockey team to bring eternal peace to its star player, whose wife has left him amid a scandal in People magazine, a publication that did not know what ice hockey was until Elisha Cuthbert started ensnaring players in her warm, pillowy bosom. Anyway, the hockey player is black, the team owner is female, and the head coach is a little person — rarities in the NHL. Instead of humorously commenting on these issues, Guru has an elephant take a dump on camera; the clumps of dung are as big as soccer balls. Oh, and that’s not all: there’s a cockfight with Pitka, who declares victory by biting the bird’s head clean off (a homoerotic metaphor for the movie perhaps?). At one point two men fight with mops soaked in buttery-colored urine — one of the men has an Acadamy Award at home he should be impaled on. At another, Pitka mimics a diarrhea noise with his mouth in a beer stein to teach one of his wacky principles, maybe the lesson of TROTS: Time’s Running Out on This Shit. There is so much scatological and ball-swinging humor you’d swear you just time warped to third-grade recess. Needless to say, this comedy is aimed at anti-social teen males who have not been potty-trained.
Strangely enough, it could also be a sequel to Freddy Got Fingered, which featured elephant ejaculation, post-labor baby lassoing, sexual assault on the handicapped and other Tom Green hobbies. To be fair, though, I always thought Freddy Got Fingered was a satire on the gross-out comedy. Love Guru is not smart enough to contemplate the meaning (or even spelling) of satire.
Austin Powers creator Mike Myers plays Guru Pitka. It’s a performance that’s so old and tired it could be carbon-dated to the Paleolithic era. And it doesn’t take much squinting to see Austin Powers in a beard — even the accents are similar. Myers tries way too hard selling his particular brand of humorless humor. He’s loud and obnoxious, clawing for attention as he zips around Love Guru on a motorized pillow; or as he frets a sitar through Steve Miller songs and namedrops “99 Problems”; or as he wears a beard of cotton candy because, well, why the hell not? This is a desperate and sad performance for Myers, who, come to think of it, has always been this pathetic with one exception (Wayne’s World, a guilty pleasure I confess). 
If Myers hasn’t crossed India off his travel itinerary he might want to sharpen a pencil. Richard Gere kissed a girl on the cheek and the entire country came unglued and nearly lynched him and his gerbil. Myers twenty-ups that by taking sophomoric jabs at Indian food, the culture and language, Indian names and even Gandhi — using Gandhi himself (shame on you Ben Kingsley). At several points he fires salvos toward Hinduism itself. Some will call it racist, although I’m going to stop just shy of that by calling it stupid. Oh yeah, and I haven't mentioned yet: Jessica Alba is in this, proving that she takes everything her agent, who is apparently a fence post, gets excreted across his desk. Maybe now that she's a mother she'll torture her spawn with her presence instead of us, the movie-going public.
Watching The Love Guru is like watching the same three shirts dry through the window of a clothes dryer — red, blue, green … red, blue, green … red, blue, green. Occasionally, they’ll fall out of order, or reverse order entirely, but you can count on those same three colors. Guru’s red, blue and green are: • Dirty names — Every name in the movie is amateur-hour material: Richard “Dick” Pants, Jacques “Le Coq” Grande, Guru Tugginmypudha, Guru Satchabigknob, Coach Cherkov. Surprisingly, Myers avoids “Your Mama” jokes only because his humor predates them by decades.
• Penis jokes — Male anatomy is drawn, baked, deep-fried, mashed, kicked, punched and otherwise totally abused. Males who fascinate this much on the male anatomy have a name, and now in California they can get married. Hear it here first: this guru is gay.
• Mariska Hargitay — She’s Jayne Mansfield’s daughter and the famous Law & Order: SVU star. She’s featured here because her full name sounds like an Indian greeting: “Mariska Hargitay, guru.” “A very happy Mariska Hargitay to you, too.” It’s no surprise when Hargitay shows up, but sadly the joke just keeps going and going and going.
These three gags are recycled so frequently that you can predict entire sequences of this zingy movie, although the gag with Pitka miming a wolverine for 10 minutes caught me way off guard. As did the pachyderm coitus in the film’s finale, but no one would ever guess that … ever. And if someone you know does guess the elephant sex before it happens, get them a good shrink. Love Guru is easily one of the worst movies of the last decade. It made me pity Mike Myers. Is he that bored with himself that he has to retreat inside these dopey characters? Even Eddie Murphy seems to have (temporarily) outgrown that stage. I question Myers’ friends too: could none of them have said, “Hey Mike, this is really stupid, and not in a good way”? Chances are all his friends grew up, got jobs, had families and at some point stopped snickering at the penises drawn on the bathroom walls. Why Myers hasn't stopped is the troubling part.
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