There's little to love in Myers's 'Guru'

Alba continues her tragic imperviousness to comedy, failing to deliver the merest syllables ("you," "and," "me," for instance) with conviction. But focusing on her limitations is unfair since the movie is essentially a vehicle for Myers's indulgences as an entertainer and his iniquities as an egotist. This is the first time we've seen Myers in the flesh since he committed assault and battery on Dr. Seuss, and I wish the cat had stayed in the hat.

Myers brings us another tale of male mojos lost and found. This one concerns a Toronto Maple Leafs player (Romany Malco) whose game has gone south since his wife (a misused Meagan Good) left him for the Los Angeles Kings' lascivious, heavily endowed goalie (Justin Timberlake). Alba and the Maples Leafs' coach (Verne Troyer) turn to Myers's title superstar spiritualist, Guru Pitka, a Westerner raised by a cross-eyed Indian wise man (Ben Kingsley, sending up himself as Gandhi).

Should the dubiously accented Pitka (he sounds like every Mike Myers character ever created) reunite the athlete with his lady and the Leafs win the Stanley Cup, Oprah Winfrey will declare him "the next Deepak Chopra." Cue humping elephants, testicular sight gags, would-be cheeky unprintable anagrams, and would-be cheekier malapropisms.

If you can see comedy gold in those hills, you probably work at Paramount, the studio that's spamming movie theaters with this junk. The joke-to-laugh ratio is woeful. From scene to scene, you get the sense that Myers, who wrote the movie with Graham Gordy (Marco Schnabel directed it), might be trying to work something out. But his process here is always more scatological than artistic. With a changeling like Peter Sellers, the whooshing you heard, even on a bad film, was that of man racing concepts. On "The Love Guru," the same sound is more of a flushing nature. In the first two "Austin Powers" movies, Myers had some inspired Sellers moments, and the movies were after something - James Bond and 1960s London.