Roger Ebert’s scathing examination of ‘The Love Guru’: “This film could have been written on toilet walls by callow adolescents”
Roger Ebert was beloved by his audience for his honesty. He always gave credit where credit was due, and sometimes, that meant piling shame on the head of a creator who really should have known better. He gave plenty of scathing reviews during his decades as America’s leading film critic, but there was one that he levelled at a performer who he’d showered with praise on previous projects.
Canadian comedian Mike Myers rose to prominence during his stint on the American sketch show Saturday Night Live. He reached a wider audience when he began to branch out into filmmaking, writing and starring in the comedy Wayne’s World. His James Bond spoof Austin Powers turned him into a household name, and by the time he voiced the titular green ogre in 2001’s Shrek, he was one of Hollywood’s most bankable stars.
Ebert wasn’t one of those film critics who looked down their nose at Myers’ distinctly juvenile sense of humour. He gave Wayne’s World and the first Austin Powers movie three out of four stars and gave a full four stars to Shrek. Then came 2008’s The Love Guru.
Myers co-wrote, co-produced, and starred in this off-the-rails vanity project. Apparently, he’d been wanting to play a guru since the 1990s, and the credibility he’d earned with Shrek and Austin Powers gave him the freedom to do exactly what he’d been dreaming about. With an exorbitant budget of $62million, he made a film in which he plays an American raised in a Hindu ashram who cons women into thinking he’s a spiritual leader because, in the world of the movie, it gets him laid. Full of culturally insensitive and misogynistic jokes that never land, The Love Guru feels like a five-hour slog even though it only clocks in at 87 minutes. Roger Ebert was having none of it.
“Myers has made some funny movies, but this film could have been written on toilet walls by callow adolescents,” he wrote in his review, adding that the comedian “has a strange manner of delivering punchlines directly into the camera and then laughing at them — usually, I must report, alone.”
Aside from being entirely unfunny, the movie, Ebert explained, was rife with bad taste, from the size jokes levelled at Verne Troyer’s character to the comedian’s complete inability to resist a penis joke. “Even his fellow actors seem to realise no one is laughing,” the critic concluded. “That’s impossible, because they can’t hear the audience, but it looks uncannily like they can, and don’t.”
Ebert wasn’t alone. Most critics eviscerated the film for its juvenile, blandly offensive, and wholly laughless sense of humour. To give Myers credit, he did seem to hear the criticism. The next film he appeared in was, of all things, Quentin Tarantino’s Inglorious Basterds, in which he played a blessedly minor role. After checking in on his eternal commitment to the Shrek franchise, he found a less irritating talent for documentary filmmaking, directing a feature about Pink Floyd and Alice Cooper’s manager, Shep Gordon.
More recently, he’s been keeping a much lower profile as a minor character actor in movies like Bohemian Rhapsody and Amsterdam. Whether we have Ebert to thank for this is unclear, but he certainly provided solace for those who watched The Love Guru and wondered whether Hollywood had lost its mind.
