I had never heard of the upcoming movie project “The Love Guru” slated for a 2008 release, but last week MTV Movies Blog reported the following:
Brining sexy back to comedy: Justin Timberlake set to join Mike Myers and Jessica Alba in “The Love Guru.”
In a time marred by the huge gap in quality of movies in general and, sadly, even more in the comedy genre, it seems that studios want to tack on as much star power to a comedy with the slightest bit of promise to maximize their earnings. Yet as many recent releases have shown, this formula of big names + comedy has seldom added up to big bucks. “The Love Guru” looks to be following in the footsteps of recent bombs full of big name actors License to Wed ($43 million, Robin Williams, John Krasinski, Mandy Moore), My Super Ex-Girlfriend ($22.5 million, Luke Wilson, Uma Thurman, Rain Wilson), The Ex ($3 million! Zach Braff, Jason Bateman, Amanda Peet), and even Evan Almighty(Steve Carell, Morgan Freeman, Wanda Sykes) which was a flop at what would be a modest $98 million for any other movie, except it cost nearly double that to make.
Joining Myers, Alba, and Timberlake in Guru will be Hollywood’s favorite midget Verne Troyer fresh off a stellar(…not) performance in a car insurance commercial that made me throw the remote at the tv, and Romany Malco who holds his ground in the Showtime series Weeds and did well in a minor role in “The 40 Year Old Virgin”. Myers will be dabbling into his first new character since he came up with Austin Powers in 1997. I think since then his work has been on the decline with the only exception being Goldmember being a lot better than The Spy Who Shagged Me.
Dying is easy, comedy is hard. I don’t think megastars Alba and Timberlake have what it takes to punch out a good live action comedic performance, though Timberlake did a great job on one particular Saturday Night Live sketch. Jessica Alba has not attempted comedy since her small role in the not-too-stellar “Idle Hands,” and while she is plenty nice to look at, her standard acting timing leaves something to be desired, and with comedic timing being even harder to master, I don’t see her doing too well here. Even with Myers being one of the best comedic minds to pass through Hollywood in the last thirty years, I think fame has led him to think he can do no wrong which shows in the lack of originality in his latest work with sequel after sequel, after Dr. Seuss flop. He need only look to Robin Williams’ latest works to see that even the best can go wrong, and Robin Williams had a much funnier #2 in “License to Wed” (The Office’s John Krasinski) than Myer’s #s 2,3,4, and 5.
I hope Hollywood realizes that big names do not equal good movies, ESPECIALLY comedies, and they start funding more comedies that rely on the good writing like some of the best movies of this and last summer: Little Miss Sunshine (who’s biggest star Steve Carell has gone on to take a step back in his success thanks to Evan Almighty) and Knocked Up (who’s biggest star was an old Ghostbuster) did, and stop feeding us unfunny garbage with ensemble casts that do go well together.
While the biggest loser with Guru figures to be us, the consumers, I feel really bad for Malco, who comes in at a close second, because he has a very promising career and could probably not turn down an opportunity to work with such big names, but will likely come out the worse for it.
