The Ladies Man (2000) from Johnny Web (Uncle Scoopy; Greg Wroblewski)
This a an expanded SNL skit. Pause on that for a minute. These sketches often dragged at six to eight minutes. If you owned such a property, would you expand it to 84 minutes?

It's not like SNL sketches without Mike Myers have been that successful recently. There was A Night at the Roxbury, Coneheads, Superstar, It's Pat. From that list, including this film, Coneheads is the highest rated at IMDb, with 5.0! 
By the way, Will Farrell was in Superstar, The Ladies Man, and A Night at the Roxbury, and was also in Drowning Mona and The Suburbans, putting him well on his way toward becoming the Bryan Brown of his generation. Brown and Farrell have each made one good movie. Brown made Breaker Morant, Farrell did Austin Powers. But Brown also has a some other respectable movies in his resume: Gorillas in the Mist and F/X, for example. Brown is 53 years old, and only has one IMDb credit rated in the 4's. Farrell is only 32, and already has four in the 4's, plus Drowning Mona at 5.23.

NUDITY REPORT
Robyn Palmer is topless in a magazine modeling scene.

Sofia Milos is topless except for pasties in a sex scene with Tim Meadows.

Tiffany Thiessen provides extensive cleavage

Tom Meadows and Lee Evans show their buns

Of course, Farrell still has a long way to go to catch his own contemporary, Pauly Shore. Already a show biz legend though barely in his 30's, Shore has seven films in the 4's and three in the 3's!!! In fact, if you exclude animated films and cameo appearances, Shore has never made a film better than the 4's! In other words, every film he's made any major contribution to has sucked. To add further perspective, Shemp Howard has 30 rated films at IMDB, and his worst movie is rated higher than Pauly's best. So Pauly has never done anything as good as the worst thing Shemp ever did. Now THAT'S talent.

Just in passing, the anti-Shore is John Cazale, the guy who played Fredo in the Godfather. He died young, and never made anything but great movies. He only acted in five movies, and every single one of them is in the Top 250 at IMDb!! His worst movie is Dog Day Afternoon, which is terrific.

Enough digressions. The Ladies Man worked out as you might have expected. Like all Ladies Man sketches, it has four minutes of funny material. That leaves you eighty minutes to work on more important things, like your tax return or a hypothetical reconstruction of the Tasmanian Tiger.

DVD info from Amazon.

  • Widescreen anamorphic, 1.85:1

  • no significant features
There are some amusing things to note in passing:
  • Julianne Moore is in this. She makes love to The Ladies Man while she is in full clown make-up. I hope this doesn't mean she read the script and liked it.
  • Billy Dee Williams narrates the film, while on camera right in front of the characters he's talking about. The Ladies Dude is always telling him to shut up.
  • A mob of angry loser husbands is marching on The Ladies Man, and they suddenly break into song and perform a street dance ala West Side Story

The Critics Vote

  • General consensus: one and a half stars. Ebert 1/4, Berardinelli 2/4, Maltin 2/4.

  • Rotten Tomatoes summary. 16% positive overall, 9% from the top critics.

The People Vote ...

  • With their votes ... IMDB summary: IMDb voters score it 4.8, 
  • With their dollars ... A disappointment, but not a big money loser.  This film was released on 2000 screens. It grossed $13 million domestically, on a production budget of $11 million.
IMDb guideline: 7.5 usually indicates a level of excellence, about like three and a half stars from the critics. 6.0 usually indicates lukewarm watchability, about like two and a half stars from the critics. The fives are generally not worthwhile unless they are really your kind of material, about like two stars from the critics. Films under five are generally awful even if you like that kind of film, equivalent to about one and a half stars from the critics or less, depending on just how far below five the rating is.

My own guideline: A means the movie is so good it will appeal to you even if you hate the genre. B means the movie is not good enough to win you over if you hate the genre, but is good enough to do so if you have an open mind about this type of film. C means it will only appeal to genre addicts, and has no crossover appeal. D means you'll hate it even if you like the genre. E means that you'll hate it even if you love the genre. F means that the film is not only unappealing across-the-board, but technically inept as well.

Based on this description, this film is a D. Not funny.

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