John Oliver, from left, Jessica Alba, Mike Myers, Manu Narayan and Verne Troyer, seated, star in The Love Guru.

PARAMOUNT PICTURES

The biggest audience Mike Myers is likely to stir for his unfunny The Love Guru is the Hindus who have been peppering movie critics for months with e-mails demanding that they get an advance preview of the film. They feared it would blaspheme their faith.

If they’d gotten to see the film ahead of time, I doubt they’d consider it an attack on Hinduism. Rather, The Love Guru pokes fun at the self-proclaimed, self-help Indian mystics who have an answer for all of life’s problems and the Hollywood celebrities who follow their kitchen-sink philosophy as though it were handed down from on high. But it’s not even too insulting to them. For even Deepak Chopra, whose books are ridiculed in The Love Guru, makes a cameo appearance.

Myers co-wrote the script (with Graham Gordy) so he has no one to blame for the over-the-top attempts at humor that fail more often than they score.

Abandoned by his missionary parents at the gates of an Indian ashram run by the exalted but cross-eyed Guru Tugginmypuddha (Ben Kingsley), he grows up schooled in the secrets of spiritual attainment, alongside Chopra. In the film’s funniest-creepiest moment, Myers’ head has been photographically transposed onto the body of a 10-year-old boy in this flashback sequence, making for a very weird sight.

Today, known far and wide as Guru Pitka, he has his own huge spiritualist compound in Los Angeles which attracts celebrities of the likes of Kanye West, Jessica Simpson, Val Kilmer and Mariska Hargitay. “Mariska Hargitay,” in fact, is also the phrase used as a form of greeting by Pitka, accompanied by a little bow and folded hands. When he enters a room, he slides in on a large tufted pillow that glides along the floor on its own power. “Mariska Hargitay.”

Guru Pitka has written several popular self-help books — I Know You Are. But What Am I? . . . Stop Hating Yourself. Stop Hating Yourself. Why Are You Still Hating Yourself? But despite all that, Guru Pitka is distressed that he is only rated the “world’s second neo-Eastern self-help spiritualist” (after Chopra). Happily, however, he sees an opportunity to wrest the crown from Chopra after Toronto Maple Leafs owner Jane Bullard (Jessica Alba) offers him $2 million to mend the broken marriage of hockey star Darren Roanoke (Romany Malco) and his wife, Prudence (Meagan Good). Roanoke has been a disaster on the ice after his one-time fling sent his wife into the arms of rival hockey star Jacques “Le Coq” Grande (an overbearing Justin Timberlake with a French-Canadian accent), who is fabled for his manliness.

Guru Pitka knows that if he can bring Darren and Prudence back together, he can get a guest shot booking on Oprah Winfrey’s show and thereby rise to the Number One ranking.

All this is played out with broad-based gags that usually involve references to sex or bodily functions. The ickiest comes in a flashback sequence involving a game in which the opponents face each other wielding mops that have been plunged into a bucket of urine.

Two Bollywood-style musical numbers amuse, but when things get slow, Myers and Gordy toss in that Hollywood staple — the bar fight — to perk things up. Too often the film lacks spontaneity in the direction of first-timer Marco Schnabel.

Although Hindus have nothing much to fret about in The Love Guru, the little people of the world should be up in arms over their belittling portrayal. In the film, the Maple Leaf coach is a pint-sized man who becomes the butt of every joke in every scene he’s in. Little people unite!

*The Love Guru

Starring: Mike Myers, Jessica Alba, Justin Timberlake, Romany Malco, Meagan Good, Ben Kingsley.

Rated: PG-13, contains adult themes, violence, profanity.

mjanuson@projo.com