It took some time to write a review of the DVD release of The Love Guru. Not because it was difficult to form an opinion of the movie. No, an opinion was easy. It was getting through the movie that was hard.

Mike Myers has had some laudable comedy successes in the past -- his work on Saturday Night Live, the first two Austin Powers films, his voice work in Shrek, and the underrated So I Married an Axe Murderer -- but his last non-animated starring role was in the abysmal Cat in the Hat. Five years after that fiasco, Myers needed a solid hit that reminded the public of all that he's capable of delivering, and what he came up with was The Love Guru.

Making fun of Deepak Chopra's self-help cottage industry (which would have been timely some 15 years ago), Myers plays Guru Pitka, a pretender to Chopra's throne with a beard and mustache so elaborate, Myers seems to think that he has to mug extra hard to be seen around them. Thanks to his love-centric philosophies, Pitka is hired by the owner of the Toronto Maple Leafs (Jessica Alba) to solve marital problems between the team's star player (Romany Malco) with his wife (Meagan Good), who's taken up with a goalie for the Los Angeles Kings named Jacques "Le Coq" Grande (Justin Timberlake). On this whisper-thin foundation of a plot, Myers piles unfunny physical shtick, dumb phalli-centric gags, and infantile, scatological humor that doesn't just fall flat, it beats the audience like a truncheon before plummeting into a stinky pile at Myers' sandal-clad feet.

It's a film in which the height of humor is Pitka's favorite greeting, "Mariska Hargitay!" uttered some 10 or 12 times over the course of the picture in an insulting, faux-Indian accent. A film in which Myers seeks to get laughs from lines like, "I think I just made a happy wee-wee," from men smacking each other with urine-soaked mops, and from elephants copulating. Timberlake does a bad Quebecois accent and sings Celine Dion. Verne "Mini Me" Troyer appears, so there can be midget jokes. And if any of that sounds even remotely funny, you're mistaken.

In the '90s, Myers was a comedic force to be reckoned with, but he's stuck in a time loop. The Love Guru begins with a Bollywood-style production of the Dolly Parton song "9 to 5," and later there's yet another musical homage, a shot-for-shot remake of Extreme's 1991 hit "More Than Words." If his incessant mugging weren't enough -- and every single joke is punctuated by Myers bugging out his eyes and making the winsome smile -- Myers' hopelessly dated references make everything even more painful. It often feels as if Myers is attempting the same sort of cleverness-free, pop-culture-recognition humor as stuff like Date Movie, except that all of his material is at least ten years out of date.

It is, in a word, bad. In a few more words, it's insultingly dumb, aggressively unfunny, and simply painful to have to sit through, and should be avoided at all costs.

Should you choose not to avoid it, the DVD from Paramount Home Video offers a transfer in anamorphic widescreen (2.35:1), enhanced for 16x9 televisions. Extras include a nine-minute making-of featurette, "Mike Myers and the Love Guru," and -- seriously -- a five-minute piece on how the fake elephant was created. There's also a six-minute featurette on the actors taking hockey training, and whole lot of deleted scenes.

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