The new trailer for The Love Guru played before my screening of Iron Man on Friday, and I am not kidding you-- Kung Fu Panda got more laughs than this did. It’s now available for viewing over at MySpace, and if you really want to subject yourself to it, you can get another look at what might be the most unfunny comedy of the summer.
The trailer includes a handful of bits we’ve seen in other trailers—the guru (Mike Myers) holding up former Mini-Me Verne Troyer and pretending he’s an Oscar (keep dreaming, Mike)—but mostly focuses on new stuff. Unfortunately, the new stuff is as unfunny as everything else we’ve seen. The guru sits on a pillow that makes a noise like a truck backing up when it goes backwards! He gets advice from truck stop bathrooms, and doesn’t get the innuendo! These are the parts of the Austin Powers movies that only 13-year-olds found funny, without anything that made the movies watchable for anyone else.
The kicker for me is that there seem to be a lot of other good performances in the movie somewhere—Romany Malco is always funny, and you see him for just a second. Most criminally, we know that Justin Timberlake is playing a Quebecois hockey player, a role that promises to be ridiculous if not hilarious. But we see him for about two seconds in this entire trailer, and if you didn’t know already, you’d never realize he’s in the movie at all. One of the world’s biggest pop stars is in this movie, and nobody is playing it up? Either the marketers really don’t know what they’re doing, or Myers’ ego is taking over the trailer and demanding that it only include his own funny parts.
Just in case that wasn’t enough to turn you off, there’s also a horrifying shot of Myers’ head CGI-ed onto a little boy’s body, playing himself as a kid. Yeah. It’s like a nightmare. Spare yourself, but if you must, you watch the trailer below:
