The only way I could imagine the trailer for The Love Guru feeling fresh to you is if you went into a coma in 1998 and have recently awoken (congrats, you missed almost all of the Bush administration). Mike Myers wears his SNL training on his sleeve as this movie appears to be the same jokes he’s been using since the first Austin Powers film… but in a different accent. He even has Verne Fucking Troyer in the film, and the only way I want to see that hideous imp is if he’s pissing on the floor in the Surreal Life house.
It’s shocking to realize that Myers apparently spent quite some time developing this ‘character,’ and yet he uses the same reactions and facial expressions and joke structures that he has always used. I was thinking about how the Marx Brothers could get away with this sort of thing in their films, and I realized that it’s because they never played characters beyond the ones for which they were famous. Groucho may have been called Captain Spaulding or Rufus T. Firefly or Dr. Hackenbush, but all of those characters were just Groucho in different situations. Here Myers is pretending to take on a whole new character while delivering all the same old schtick.
But don’t let me tell you – here’s the shitty trailer so you can make up your own mind about how lame this looks.