YMMV / The Love Guru

• Hilarious in Hindsight: At the time, the idea of Jessica Alba (then best known for her Ms. Fanservice roles) running any enterprise bigger than a lemonade stand was treated as a case of Questionable Casting by critics. Alba had the last laugh when she went on to co-found the organic/non-toxic household/beauty products business The Honest Company, currently valued at over a billion and a half dollars, far bigger than the hockey team her character manages in this film.
• Humor Dissonance: Considered one of the worst comedies of all time, anything that the characters in the film find funny generally makes a viewer groan.
• It's the Same, Now It Sucks!: Not only did the film come in for criticism for blatantly recycling jokes and plot beats from the Austin Powers films, many critics pointed out that its reliance on over-the-top visual jokes and gross-out humor had become a heavily outdated approach by 2008 — likely a result of its lengthy gestation period, with Mike Myers having been planning the film since at least the start of the 2000s, when this type of humor was the standard approach for big-screen comedies — and made no concessions to the smarter and more naturalistic direction that the genre had been moving in since The 40-Year-Old Virgin three years prior.
• Mis-blamed: For all of the film's faults, one that can't be dumped at the feet of Mike Myers is the awkward Info Dump from Jay Kell and Trent Lueders that opens the main storyline. Stephen Colbert and Jim Gaffigan were cast in the roles after the 2007-08 Writer's Guild of America strike had begun, so all that Myers could do was write down a list of the major backstory points and hope that Colbert and Gaffigan could improvise something that got the required exposition across.
• Questionable Casting: Ben Kingsley playing a character that mocks Hindu gurus and most Indian people would probably be offended by is pretty insane considering he won the Academy Award for best actor for his performance as the title role in Gandhi. Made worse by the fact that Kingsley himself is of Indian descent.
• Rooting for the Empire: Le Coq is much more likable than Pitka and is actually somewhat humorous due to his stupidity.
• Special Effect Failure:
  • For all of the film's many celebrity cameos, "Céline Dion" is represented by only being seen in the distance, making it obvious they couldn't actually get her in the movie but still refused to drop the gag. It stands out all the more compared with the more successful (even if not entirely perfect) attempt at representing Oprah Winfrey via stock footage and a voice impersonator.^note This was apparently the result of a very literal Stock Footage Failure — the film-makers had intended to also represent Dion using stock footage, but found out late in the day that the footage didn't match up properly, and between having no money for reshoots and an ongoing writers' strike, they couldn't retool the scene to remove her.
  • It should also go without saying that compositing a grown Mike Myer's head onto a little boy's body looks as horrifying as it sounds.
• Squick: The Bar Brawl scene, where somebody gets a huge shard of glass stuck in his forehead.
• Tainted by the Preview: The trailers alone were enough to turn audiences off, which, along with the reviews, ensured that it got little attention and bombed.
• Unintentionally Unsympathetic: Pitka is supposed to come off as a Loveable Sex Maniac, but his perverted ways and Politically Incorrect Hero status makes him highly unlikable.

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