Hamlet 2

The House Bunny

Vicky Cristina Barcelona

Elegy

Bottle Shock

Pineapple Express

Step Brothers

Brideshead Revisited

Tropic Thunder

The Dark Knight

Hellboy II: The Golden Army

Hancock

Don't fret if you don't find yourself laughing much -- or at all -- seeing The Love Guru. Mike Myers, the star and co-writer, looks so deliriously pleased with his own comic brilliance throughout the 87-minute running time of this witless, bottom-of-the-barrel mess it's like he's laughing for us. Or is it at us? The plot, such as it is, has Myers playing "Guru Pitka," an American raised by Indian holy men who treks back to the United States. He's an also-ran compared to New Age supernova Deepak Chopra. Determined to ascend to the rock star-level self-help stratosphere, Pitka decides to grab the attention of high priestess of supermarket-style self-help Oprah Winfrey by tackling the romantic problems of a Toronto Maple Leafs hockey player (Romany Malco) whose wife (Meagan Goode) has dumped him for a prodigiously endowed French goalie named (are you laughing yet?) James "Le Coq" Grande (Justin Timberlake). Verne Troyer (the diminutive actor who played Mini Me) is back as the butt of Myers's endless "size" jokes playing the team coach and Jessica Alba plays the team owner; this casting alone is the funniest thing about the entire movie. Meanwhile, Sir Ben Kingsley does penance for past pretension by appearing in flashbacks as the star's cross-eyed childhood mentor, Guru Tugginmypudah.

By any standard, The Love Guru is a jaw-dropping, career-redefining misstep, the kind that almost certainly guarantees a long-lingering, if not permanent, case of career cooties. The thing isn't much more than a random assortment of celebrity cameos, tired penis jokes, elephant poop jokes, human defecation jokes and size jokes, many of them delivered straight into the camera by a smug, apparently delusional Myers as if he's certain we're all convulsed with laughter. Myers was justifiably praised for his great work on Saturday Night Live and in the Austin Powers movies. Now he seems out of phase, stuck in some bizarre, overly insulated time warp. That may help explain why he looks as if he's hitting Peter Sellers levels of genius when he's really only approximating Jerry Lewis on his very worst day.

by Stephen Rebello

credit: George Kraychyk/©2008 by Paramount Pictures. All rights reserved.