Love stinks

This week there’s a little corner of the multiplex reserved for where fun goes to die, and the door to that vacuum is labeled The Love Guru. After a six-year absence (perhaps spent doing penance for the disturbingly wrong adaptation of The Cat in the Hat) Mike Myers inexplicably thinks that a thinly veiled minstrel show is the key to his comeback.

Here Myers sashays his Austin Powers shtick via the threads of Guru Pitka, a wildly popular Hollywood self-help enabler. You know he’s wildly popular in Tinseltown circles because at one point he’s doted on by a handful of second-rate cameos in his palatial ashram, including a fat Val Kilmer, who looks like he’s enduring some kind of karmic payback laid down on him from the late Marlon Brando for making fun of him in The Island of Dr. Moreau. But if you want to see Jessica Simpson fake an orgasm, there’s that. Like her singing and acting, she doesn’t fake that very well, either.

Following aside, Pitka still has some issues. He resents Deepak Chopra’s reign as the go-to guru, and sees a way to displace him by reconciling an on-the-skids hockey superstar with his estranged wife so that the Maple Leafs can win the Stanley Cup and Pitka can get in the pants of the team owner (Jessica Alba, who actually earns some cred here by faking an inexplicable attraction to Myers). Also on hand is Vern “Mini Me” Troyer as the team manager and recurring butt of Myers’ derision. Yeah, midget jokes are funny ‘cause they’re real, right?

The aforementioned key unlocks nothing but a dusty vault of dick, masturbation and poop jokes. Hands down, The Love Guru is one of the most cynical pieces of crap-joke recycling of recent memory … creaky witticisms literally dredged from the teeter-totter set.

Anyone remember, “If your Uncle Jack was stuck up on the roof, would you help your Uncle Jack off?”

Yeah, so does Mike Myers. Zing.

The rest of the gags shoplifted from the Old Jokes Home are of the same vintage. And sophistication. Just delivered in a grating faux-Hindi accent. Although not as grating as Justin Timberlake’s outer-ragious-ly bad French accent. The man has the comedic stylings of a funeral director. But Timberlake’s piss-poor timing is tolerable compared with Myers’ mugging and self-satisfied leering at the camera after the squat-and-drop of each steaming gag.

To say that the film doesn’t deliver even one laugh would be unfair. I did chuckle once. It was when Myers got sucker-punched in the nuts by Troyer. Not because it was funny, but because it was just nice to see Myers get slugged in the ‘nads. Too bad the punch was faked. But as a metaphorical moment, it’s the thought that counts.