THE LOVE GURU

Imagine a Three Stooges short about a sincere but bumbling guru hired to help a sports figure repair his ailing marriage and play better: Curly as the guru, Larry as his assistant and Moe as his business manager. Played straight with pratfalls, slapstick and some visual gags, the whole thing would finish in a compact 20 minutes. Now imagine that same thing stretched to nearly 90, with Curly mugging for the camera, acting smug and self-satisfied, and spewing a stream of poop, piss, penis, fart, booger and jerk-off jokes, all while smiling and laughing as if to demand, "Aren't I adorable? Aren't I adorable? Aren't I adorable? "

I don't know who to feel sorrier for: myself and other audience members for having to watch this self-indulgent crap, or star, co-writer and producer Mike Myers, who, with this and his most recent live-action film, 2003's The Cat in the Hat (in which his hat springs into erection at the sight of a sexy mom), genuinely appears to be developmentally delayed. It's like his brain never grew emotionally beyond 12 years old.

I suppose we can save our sympathy—Myers has a string of hit movies, from Wayne's World to the Austin Powers and animated Shrek franchises, so he's indeed brought much laughter to the world and is a very rich Hollywood power player. But clearly, with nobody to naysay him and people treating his droppings like gold—and he's far from the only comedian where this is the case—Myers appears to have lost connection with the real lives and everyman empathy that drives the kind of long-form, narrative comedy he makes. Even The Three Stooges, whose forte was sketch slapstick, grounded themselves in recognizable travails of trying to make a living or trying to fit in with more successful society. I'm not going to get all film-schooly, but Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton did slapstick and silly visuals, too, but you still got a sense of a vulnerable and genuine human being at the center.

Myers here plays anything but. As Guru Pitka, a rich Hollywood power player whose solipsistic spoutings say nothing but are treated like brilliance—are we hitting close to home here?—he lives in a mega-mansion to which followers flock. He has an acronym for every occasion, and a bundle of best-sellers with titles like Does It Hurt When You Do That? Don't Do That! and other Pee-wee Hermanesque aphorisms, minus the irony.

The plot involves hockey, probably only because Myers is a fan and every boy who grew up in Ontario dreams of being on the venerable primetime series "Hockey Night in Canada." Darren Roanoke (Romany Malco), a Toronto Maple Leafs star, has lost his edge ever since wife Prudence (Meagan Good) has taken up with L.A. Kings goalie Jacques "Le Coq" Grande (Justin Timberlake, in a broad turn showing great comedy instincts). Over the objections of Leafs coach Cherkov (Verne Troyer, the diminutive “Mini-Me” from the Austin Powers films), team-owner Jane Bullard (a colorless and floundering Jessica Alba) hires Pitka to reunite the Roanokes and get Darren's game back on so that the Leafs can win the Stanley Cup. Pitka groupie Jane falls for the sweet but disgusting guru, though with an unintentional, creepy Misery vibe.

Manu Narayan, the lead in the 2004 Broadway musical Bombay Dreams, acquits himself well as Pitka's aide-de-camp, though Ben Kingsley as Pitka's cross-eyed mentor, Guru Tugginmypudha, is an embarrassment. Mariska Hargitay has a funny, uncredited cameo as herself, Deepak Chopra has an unfunny, uncredited cameo as himself, and Stephen Colbert and John Oliver basically do their shticks from “The Colbert Report” and “The Daily Show.” First-time director Marco Schnabel helms briskly if not well, though that might be a credit to the three film editors. As for the grating and gross Myers himself, please, let's just turn off the Mike.