'Love Guru': From Mike Myers, an Unholy Mess

Austin Powers and Shrek have nothing to worry about — but unsuspecting audiences sure do.

Which is to say that The Love Guru's chastity-belt wearing, inane-mantra-spouting Guru Pitka — Mike Myers' latest (allegedly) comic creation — is going to steal neither fan attention nor the star's availability from his other franchises.

Those suckered into seeing this relentless exercise in juvenilia, meanwhile, may well recoil from sports comedies, Bollywood musicals, self-help spiritualists, puns and even characters with beards for the foreseeable future.

Or from ever wanting to see Myers again, in any context.

It's hard to imagine who the comedian thought the target audience might be for a slapsticky self-help/ice-hockey/ elephant-poo comedy. It's rated PG-13, but it's essentially unsuitable for even mildly discerning viewers of any age.

The Love Guru is about how Pitka, the world's No. 2 Near Eastern spiritualist — after Deepak Chopra, who foolishly agreed to a cameo — follows his bliss from an ashram to the locker room of the Toronto Maple Leafs.

Their star player's wife is being shtupped, you see, by competitor Jacques Le Coq Grande, played gamely by Justin Timberlake in a padded codpiece (where's the Zohan when you need him?), and that's putting Toronto's finest off his game. So the team's owner (a hapless Jessica Alba) has hired Pitka to help salvage the squad's Stanley Cup prospects.

The guru's methods involve penis jokes, lewd self-help shtick, elephant erotica and effluvia, and an endless stream of single-entendres — all given the bum's rush by first-time director Marco Schnabel without the slightest sense of timing or comic flair.

Myers, who co-wrote and co-produced — effectively meaning no one could say nay, no matter how lame his ideas — has imported Verne "Mini-Me" Troyer from the Austin Powers movies to be subjected to hobbit jokes and other short shtick. Stephen Colbert provokes exactly one smile in his five minutes of screen time as a drug-addicted hockey announcer, but Brits Ben Kingsley and John Oliver are entirely upstaged by their character names as cross-eyed Guru Tugginmypudha (sound it out), and agent Dick Pants.

None of them — not one, not for a moment — is remotely funny.