Guru of comedy appears to have lost his powers

After the Austin Powers trilogy, there was a sense that comedian Mike Myers had elevated his game. He evolved the series from slapdash skits into real movies with connective tissue and seamless characters.

The Love Guru is a regressive step in the extreme. Not only does it stumble badly from one skit to another, the skits themselves have too much dead air. Neither Myers nor a group of hesitant actors – who seem more like an endless number of sidekicks – show confidence in the material. They seem to perform bits so they may quickly duck the rotten tomatoes surely headed their way.

The basic problem with Love Guru is the filmmakers never define the central joke. Myers plays Guru Pikta, the Number Two Near-Eastern Self-Help Specialist. (Deepak Chopra is Number One.) This inspires all sorts of spoofs of self-help mumbo jumbo, inane mantras, Bollywood dances and Beatles-era costumes. But these almost get lost amid gags involving urination, defecation and elephants. Not to mention Verne Troyer, who played Mini-Me in two Austin Powers films, and is the butt of endless size jokes.

Oddly, Myers entrusted his first film with a new character to a rookie director, Marco Schnabel, who directed second unit on all three Austin Powers films. Schnabel not only lacks visual flair and the ability to pull together a style to link the skits, but he is probably too young and inexperienced to help Myers edit himself.

Guru Pitka is hired by Toronto Maple Leafs owner (Jessica Alba) to reunite her star player (Romany Malco) and his wife (Meagan Good), who is shacked up with Los Angeles Kings goalie Jacques Grande (Justin Timberlake). On the eve of the NHL's Stanley Cup Finals, this has sent her player's game into the toilet. The tissue-thin plot is interrupted for flashbacks to Pitka's guru classes at an ashram by an exalted cross-eyed guru (Ben Kingsley).

This profligate film totally marginalises Kingsley, Alba, Good and Malco. Timberlake fares better because he has a fun caricature to play, a goalie with a crush on Celine Dion. The only actor who really scores is Stephen Colbert, who plays a drug-addled hockey broadcaster.

The Love Guru. Stars Mike Myers and Jessica Alba. Rated 15.