When there’s nothing out that I want to watch, I go back and search for past, usually more obscure releases that’re either so good or so bad that they’re worth talking about. For me Motivational Growth and the novel Sea of Glass are great examples of forgotten releases worth reassessing, because of how good and interesting they are.

The Love Guru however is an example of a past release worth reassessing because of its amazing ability to depress you.

This failed Mike Myers vehicle from 2008 follows the ‘comedic’ attempts of Indian-raised American guru Pitka to help hockey player Darren to fix his marriage and kickstart his career. Along the way he learns some things about self-love and manages to bang Jessica Alba…somehow.

The Characters

Typically, I don’t enjoy comedies. If a film’s main goal is to simply make the audience laugh then chances are, I’m not going to have a good time. The comedies I tend to enjoy have more things to do than amuse. I don’t think I laughed once at Return of the Living Dead yet I absolutely adored it because of its great characters, beautifully written dialogue and unique premise. I giggled once or twice at 2016’s Ghostbusters and I still hated it.

This is why I found The Love Guru so unbearable. All its energy seems to be focused on trying to make you laugh and nothing else. As a consequence, the characters feel shallow. They’re nothing but stereotypes designed to perform comedic banter and god-awful drama.

Pitka, while full of charm and bizarre wisdom, is a poetic character who knows everything about teaching love but nothing about practising it. The film takes his arc of learning to love himself so he can love another quite seriously. Maybe we’re not supposed to shed tears for him but I think the screenwriters want us to be at least interested in seeing how he does. The film approaches the supporting characters’ arcs just as seriously. We’re supposed to care about Darren’s reconciliation with his wife. We’re supposed to care about Jessica Alba’s hockey owner struggling to find love with all the hate she’s getting from hockey fans.

None of them are empathetic. They don’t become any more interesting as the plot progresses, they just display the same ‘likable’ characteristics and declare how they’ve grown and changed.

The Comedy

This is where the film’s ability to depress really shines.

The Love Guru is of its time and most of it is its own fault. So many jokes are based on the pop culture of the time and they’ve all aged terribly. There’re references to Brangelina, Deepak Chopra, Celine Deon, Pitka’s desire is to appear on the Oprah Winfrey show for god’s sake!

The age of the jokes are on full display due to changes in not only pop culture but culture in general. There’re jokes in this film that I can confidently label as sexist, ableist, homophobic, fatphobic and racist. I have no doubt that there were a lot of people who felt comfortable laughing at these kinds of jokes in 2008. I also know however that even in 2008 people considered these jokes as ones that you either got or you didn’t, and over time the crowd who got them have shrank considerably compared to the crowd who didn’t.

If the comedy isn’t dated or offensive to some minority, then it’s something sexual. The innuendos are constant and terrible. Some of them aren’t bad, which I could’ve at least appreciated if the rest of the film wasn’t so cluttered with them.

Overall, The Love Guru is very deserving of its infamy. With its one-dimensional characters and abundance of bad comedy, it’s a challenging watch. I’d only recommend it if you’ve been feeling low during the pandemic and want your spirits lifting. When you watch it, you at least see how far comedy and culture has come in the last decade. It might not make you feel better but it’ll remind you that things could be worse.

I give The Love Guru a vicious 2 out of 10.

Yeah. It’s that bad.