Review of The Ladies Man (2000) by Edith N — 21 Aug 2010

A World Where Reality Need Not Intrude.

The fact is, the standards for movies made from [i]Saturday Night Live[/i] sketches are quite abominably low. This is, I suspect, because many of them are made from recurring characters who have no right to recur. You have to be able to build something out of those characters to make them interesting, and for a lot of them, there's nowhere to go. The reason [i]It's Pat[/i] failed is that Pat is a one-joke character who really shouldn't have appeared more than once or twice. (Though I must admit I found the movie mildly amusing.) I haven't seen [i]Night at the Roxbury[/i], but arguably those were recurring characters who didn't even have one joke. I think the goal for a while was to get characters which would make people tune in hoping that they would be able to see those characters again. Only quite a lot of the time, those characters were tedious enough to make people stop watching. It is, after all, a show with a notably uneven past.

Leon Phelps (Tim Meadows) is, as his mailman (Kevin McDonald) points out, pretty well trapped in the '70s. He believes himself a true expert in the ways of women, and it's true that he has had a lot of sex. He has a radio show in the wee hours of the morning. His producer, Julie Simmons (Karyn Parson), warns him over and over that his . . . frank talk is going to get them both fired, but he scoffs that station manager Bucky Kent (Eugene Levy) doesn't have the power or the will. The power, he does not. He does, however, have the will to call the FCC. And so Leon and Julie are fired. Meanwhile, a group of men whose wives Leon has slept with are determined to hunt him down and, um, ensure that Leon won't ever sleep with anyone's wife again. Leon then gets a letter from the mysterious "Sweet Thing," who offers to let him live with her and be her love, and she'll support him for the rest of his life. Only she doesn't quite give enough information for him to know who she is, and she's clearly too dumb to realize how many "sweet things" there have been.

Apparently, the original script called for a "Billy Dee Williams type" to play Lester, himself an amusing enough character. The conceit that his narration is actually spoken onscreen to the bewilderment of the other characters is enough to lighten perhaps five or ten minutes of the movie on its own. I'm not entirely certain how Williams heard of the script, though I do know he's had his ins with [i]SNL[/i] now and again. ("You one malt liquor picka!") The impression the scant special features leave me with suggests that no one really expected he'd do the movie, so they figured they'd audition for it. Indeed, they actually seem to have done, and it's just that Billy Dee Williams happened to successfully audition for the part. His voice is one of those which is too noteworthy to be reproduced, and he almost seems what Leon Phelps would grow to be.

I don't believe a real Leon Phelps--a man who could confuse clam chowder and chlamydia so hopelessly--could really attract that many women. Of course, that's where willing suspension of disbelief comes in. Or, perhaps, just humour. After all, the world abounds in men who think they're as smooth and sexy as Leon Phelps does, whether they get as many women as Leon does or not. Funnily, the implication I rather tended to get from the sketches was that Leon had a lot more in common with those men than you'd think. The reason Leon-from-the-sketches was so ridiculously ignorant was that he was rather devoid of practical experience. This one . . . well, among other things, he is able to make some shrewd observations toward the end of the film which kind of jar with how he's presented through the rest of the movie. I have no doubt they're true, but I'm not sure I believe them coming from him.

So, then. Is Leon Phelps, the Ladies' Man, a one-joke character who can't hold a movie together? Yes and no. He really is a one-joke character. However, the script allows that one joke to go two places. There is the quest for a job and/or Sweet Thing, and there is that cabal of angry husbands seeking out Leon. Neither could support a movie on their own, and it's true that the combination of the two does rather make for a confused ending. However, it is enough to provide for eighty-four minutes of at least mild amusement. Certainly there are worse movies with nothing to do with sketch comedy at all. They could have fared far worse here, as I've seen these originators do. Actually, I've always felt rather sorry for Tim Meadows, trapped as he was on that show for nine years while his colleagues went on to bigger and brighter things. Yes, all right, several of those colleagues have since cut their own careers off at the knees, but still.