The Ladies Man review

Just as we were wondering why a talent like Spike Lee felt the need to make something as unsophisticated and preachy as Bamboozled, along comes a comedy about a black man with a huge cock who shags white women the way their husbands can't. Ah, now we see, Spike.

American TV institution Saturday Night Live continues its risible run of sketch-to-movie adaptations, proving that Wayne's World and The Blues Brothers were the flukes while Coneheads, A Night At The Roxbury and Superstar are the real thing - a single idea stretched unfeasibly thin into feature length.

In short doses, you can see why Leon would be endearing on TV. Tim Meadows plays him with self-confident cheek, coming over as a doe-eyed Ali G, with style cues from John Shaft. In short doses, his ignorance is cute, his promiscuity laughable and his poverty undeniable. He's a low-rent gigolo in outdated clothes who hangs round bus stations so he can pick up low-income skanks in order to prove his manhood.

Only of course this is too un-Hollywood. So although he hangs out in a ratty bar full of winos, they're cute winos. And despite claiming that he's notched up hundreds of women by setting his sights low, all the ones we see are fantastically pert. In one stunning case of miscasting, a fortysomething businessman's wife who he nailed in the late '80s turns out to be Tiffan-Amber Thiessen. Which would make her, what? About 14 at the time?

Stuck with a set-up but nowhere to go, the movie coughs out a single funny scene (involving a nun), shoehorns in some monumentally unamusing poo-eating and finds time for - we shit you not - a song and dance routine before a conclusion that queasily combines an unlikely romance with his producer with what looks like a white mob lynching a black man. Ultimately, here's proof that the SNL team are having the last laugh - and the joke's on us.