Mike Myers is an expert at being “in the moment,” a comic zone where his commitment to the character is so fierce that he stays sharp even when his material isn’t great.
This talent buoyed up the three “Austin Powers” movies, which were sometimes weirdly funny even when the writing ran out of steam. He tests the boundaries of this with “The Love Guru,” an initially amusing but eventually grating comedy.
Myers plays the Guru Pitka, the kind of holy man that courts movie stars to his program of enlightenment in the hopes of someday being on with Oprah. The movie’s plot puts Pitka in Toronto, where he helps a flagging hockey player (Romany Malco) whose romantic woes are affecting his play.
The look and voice of Guru Pitka are wonderfully well-sustained by Myers; his mantra, “Mariska Hargitay,” which he intones at the end of his pronouncements, just happens to coincide with the name of a popular TV star.
The film, which Myers co-wrote, is absolutely at its best in the opening 20 minutes, as we meet Pitka and take time for a series of wacky sidebars: a Bollywood-style musical fantasy, a flashback to Pitka’s boyhood with his cross-eyed mentor (Ben Kingsley hooting it up), a musical rendition of “9 to 5” on the sitar.
Myers’ talent for one-off ideas comes through: the utterly disturbing digital effects involved in putting his adult head on the body of a boy for the flashback, for instance, which sends up all the labored computer-generated effects in movies.
And somehow Myers gets more mileage out of his relationship with tiny actor Verne Troyer (Mini-me of the “Austin Powers” movies), as the short-person jokes fly.
But the movie grinds down when the plot kicks in. And Myers’ indulgence of the most juvenile bodily function jokes, including the dumbest roster of phallo-centric puns ever collected in a single movie, is tiring. I get that it’s supposed to be stupid, like 12-year-olds giggling over prank calls, but a little goes a long way.
The cast includes Jessica Alba and Justin Timberlake (as a pompous French Canadian goalie), but none of the supporting players really gets any decent comic material except Kingsley. This is Myers’ show, and — sad as it to report, because I’m a fan — he runs it into the ground. Mariska Hargitay.
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