Mike Myers, Please Stop It

By: Bob Mackey

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March 28, 2008

Having been a citizen of the Internet for over a decade, I’ve grown quite a tolerance for horrible sights, sounds, and YouTube videos of fat women dancing in their depressing, unfurnished apartments.  Yet, even with my current fortitude, I couldn’t help but pee inside of in my pants (instead of outside my pants like normal) when I saw this animated banner ad: 

Yes, Mike Myers is back, with another crazy and vaguely sexually threatening character!  And if the above doesn’t even raise the needle on your spookometer, what follows will have you running to Radio Shack to buy replacement spookometer parts: 

Myers’ frightening rape gaze might as well be changed to the old cartoon tradition of pupils replaced by dollar signs, but there’s something much more striking about his face: that aggressively raised eyebrow.  If a picture’s worth 1000 words, this simple facial gesture indicates one general sentiment: “You stupid bastards in Middle America will watch anything, won’t you?” (That was 11 words if you were playing along at home.)  Because if this weren’t true, how could Myers continue to have a career in the first place?  There are only so many contracts with Satan in Hollywood, and most of them have been signed by the Baldwins.

The real tragedy about The Love Guru is that Myers was not always condemned to a life of playing broad, hokey characters repeating the same limited shtick for far longer than necessary; if you look at his work in the 80s and 90s, most of it was inarguably funny—and it’s aged well, too.  While it’s nearly impossible to watch Jim Carrey seizure his way through one of his many 1990s comedies, the work of Myers seems very subdued and somewhat timeless in comparison.  Myers is by no means a comedy legend, but he has a sort of competency and inventiveness that a lot of comedians lack.  Of course, this went immediately down the toilet of your choice when he realized that he really didn’t have to try anymore; and this sentiment of Myers is best symbolized up by Austin Powers 2: The Spy Who Shagged Me.

I’m not trying to be too much of a Myers apologist here, but the first Austin Powers was a legitimately good movie: it was goofy and light-hearted, completely unaware of its own charm, and deftly satirized spy movies along with the 1990s’ political correctness movement.  The less said about the sequels, the better, but since I’m being paid to write this, it would probably make my employers happy if I explained why the Austin Powers sequels are only slightly more fun than kidney stones.   If you haven’t noticed, there’s a certain cynicism at work in the very premises of the two Austin Powers sequels; essentially, Mike Myers made the same movie three times, each time losing a significant amount of quality.  With these sequels, Mike Myers realized that he didn’t have to work hard anymore, so long as he created shrieking human cartoon characters that could reproduce the joke setups from the first movie with only a marginally different change in content.  There were a few good jokes here and there, but 99% of the time the Austin Powers sequels were stuck in a quagmire of self-love and joke repetition.

Then we have 2003’s The Cat in the Hat, which I believe set some sort of deeply distressing record for being the movie with the most commercial tie-ins in existence.  Not only was Mike Myers and his freakish cat makeup plastered over soda bottles and Swiffer refills, our government post offices also featured full-sized cardboard cutout of Myers in a getup that could have only come from the nightmares of serial killers.  So, The Cat in the Hat wasn’t just god-awful; it was also inescapable.  And Mike Myers certainly didn’t help, what with his winking-at-the-camera interpretation of The Cat as Linda Richman augmented with horrible cat prosthetics.  I don’t have access to focus group questionnaires for this movie, but I’m guessing that test audiences found burn victims more huggable, and most importantly, more advertisable.  If you still believed there was a god after 2000’s The Grinch, The Cat in The Hat must have definitely presented a good case for option B.  And it was all Mike Myers’ fault.

So when you are presented with the chance to go see The Love Guru this summer, save yourself ten dollars and ninety minutes, and instead write a letter to Mike Myers explaining why he needs to go back to Canada immediately.  His career cannot continue without intervention.  Right now, he’s fantasizing about how the catchphrases from this yet-to-be-released movie will make our country’s office banter all the more insufferable.  This is a dream that cannot come true.  And Until Mike Myers makes Coffee Talk: The Movie, he’s dead to me.

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