Sometimes you just know a movie is going to be bad. But the level of bad the movie could be can only be speculated on because, well, you have to see the movie. I got the sense “The Love Guru” was going to be bad mostly because of the unfunny trailer. It just reeked of recycled material. Then there was this internet backlash prior to its release claiming it was horrible, worst movie of the year, a turd, a bomb, and while word on the internet snowballs at times unjustly, other times highly appropriate and for “The Love Guru”, they hit the nail on the head. This movie sucks.

I hate using that word in describing a film; it’s too simple to use and it isn’t very analytical, but seriously, this movie sucks. Why does it suck? Let me be the first to use the word in a critical study of why this movie is bad. For starters it commits the mortal sin against the genre of comedy, every genre has that one sin that will automatically make the movie bad, and for comedy its funny, something “The Love Guru” forgot to be. It just isn’t funny. I’m not being an old stick-in-the-mud either, I can laugh at anything. I’m usually the cause of laughter, but I’ll be damned if this film can crack one solid good laugh. I attended this mid-day, so there are less people to catch that domino effect that is laughing. So in order to make a smaller crowd laugh, you got to be, well, funny. Every joke here is certainly an old joke, one’s we’ve seen Myers do numerous times from “SNL” or “Austin Powers”. In fact, the film structurally follows the “Austin Powers” formula; they just replaced the James Bond character spoofs, with self-help people. Yawn.

Myers seems game after a five year live-action hiatus, but at times he stops the film and begs for a laugh. Please? No, Michael you can’t have one. Comedy now days relies on potty humor and language, perhaps perfected by Judd Apatow, but Myers copies and amps up all of it, to boring results. The jokes seem stale, as if your co-worker tried to tell a joke and failed. We expect more from Myers; he gave us a lot of catch phrases, memorable skits on “SNL”, and even a comedy franchise, but in the end you must grow and Myers is certainly stuck in neutral. The jokes are so unfunny, the suck laughter out of you. There’s my definition of suck in describing a movie. A movie sucks therefore it takes something forcefully out of you. For 88 minutes we are being unable to commit to the simple act of laughing and by the time we walk out we are wondering what that feeling was and if we can do it again. In the film, the Guru puts trademarks on phrases, so let me do one: D.U.M.B., TM. D is for directionless, U is for unfunny, M is for mind-numbing, and B is for bad, trademark. Please avoid the worst film of 2008. If tempted, remember D.U.M.B.