For what it is, a 90-minute spin-off of a Saturday Night Live sketch, Reggie Hudlin’s film The Ladies Man is not bad. If you have some familiarity with some examples of this benighted genre, like Stuart Saves His Family, It’s Pat, A Night at the Roxbury or Superstar, you will take this evaluation as a giddy rave. The Ladies Man has some funny, dirty-minded jokes, a few amusing cameos (including Julianne Moore in clown makeup) and a soundtrack loaded with juicy cuts of mid-70s vintage soul and funk: a lot of Gamble and Huff, a soupcon of Isley Brothers and a plateful of Parliament’s ”Up for the Down Stroke.”
Tim Meadows plays Leon Phelps, a pint-size Don Juan with a foot-high Afro, a heavy lisp and a taste for the finer things in life: Courvoisier, scented candles, water beds and a special product called ”Pina Colada Butt Lotion.” All these are, needless to say, the accouterments of his vocation, which is, as it were, getting freaky with the ladies, who find him irresistible. In the film, Leon Phelps–aka The Ladies Man–and his producer, Julie are fired from the radio station due to the explicit nature of Leon’s on-air dialog with callers. Unable to find work anywhere else, Leon begins to despair, though this doesn’t stop him from continuing to have sex with every single woman he can possibly have sex with.
One such woman’s husband, Barney, catches them in the act and chases a naked Leon out the window. All he can see is Leon’s “Have a Nice Day” smiley face tattooed on his butt. Using that as his only clue, he looks around the Internet and discovers a support group for men who have also been victims of this unknown fornicator: “Victims of the Smiling Ass,” they’re called, and their leader is a Greco-Roman wrestling aficionado named Lance (Will Ferrell). This group eventually learns Leon’s identity and sets out to kill him, though they burst into a well-choreographed song-and-dance number first. Meanwhile, Leon has received a note from a woman he once called “Sweet Thing” who is rich and wants to run off with him. Trouble is, he calls everyone “Sweet Thing,” and with so many notches on his water bed, well, it’s hard to figure out who this one is.
It’s hard not to smile at a character like Leon, who is so oblivious to the fact that he’s a tactless moron, smiling rather sincerely as he tells a woman that it looks like someone put “two fine, honey-baked hams in the back of your dress.” Hudlin keeps the story moving, pausing just slightly over some rather funny set pieces, like a soul-food eating contest between Leon and Julie’s uptight ex-fiance that progresses from pickled pigs’ feet through delicacies whose names cannot be printed here to something called ”gristle lumps.”
It may cross your mind that this is a movie about a black man pursued by a mob of whites intent on castrating him for improper attention to ”their women.” Keep this in mind, though: Hudlin is not Spike Lee, and he smothers the potentially volatile political and sexual subtext of the movie in genial silliness.
As it ambles toward its conclusion, and the plot takes precedence over the gags, The Ladies Man wears thin, as this kind of picture inevitably does. A sketch character is an embodied joke who never changes and requires no inner life or complex motivation. But the lead character in a feature film, as dictated by the iron law of Hollywood convention, has to undergo a transformation, has to grow and has to end up as a person with whom the audience can identify. As such, by the end of the movie Leon Phelps is no longer a freak with the ladies but just a nice guy with a speech impediment and curious taste in clothes. It’s an enjoyable enough movie, and the term “Freaky-Deeky Sex Land” is a term that can never truly go out of style. It’s a fun little romp, but don’t give it too much credit.