For the past nine years, Tim Meadows has been an icon of mediocrity, a place-holding fixture on Saturday Night Live with the uncanny ability to make every character he played seem like essentially the same person. Meadows makes his starring debut in The Ladies Man, the latest SNL Studios production, as the lisping, sex-obsessed, low-rent womanizer he's beaten into the ground in countless SNL skits. Directed by the eminently overqualified Reginald Hudlin (House Party, Boomerang), The Ladies Man's meager plot sends Meadows scurrying around Chicago looking for the lovestruck woman who sent him an anonymous love letter. Will Ferrell co-stars as Meadows' antagonist, the wrestling-obsessed leader of a group of angry husbands looking to exact revenge on Meadows for his many indiscretions with their wives. And, for those who like a little earnest romance with their anal-sex jokes, The Ladies Man casts Karyn Parsons as Meadows' love interest, a smart, beautiful radio producer who looks beyond his skanky exterior and finds the slightly less skanky fellow hiding just beneath it. Like A Night At The Roxbury and Superstar, The Ladies Man radiates desperation as it stretches a tired skit into a feature film, a process that involves the obligatory montage sequence, song-and-dance number, plot digressions, and an interminable soul-food-eating contest that rips off the most notorious scene in Pink Flamingos. Also like its predecessors, it makes 80 minutes feel like an eternity, wasting several gifted performers in the process: Lee Evans offers a slight variation on his masochistic turn in There's Something About Mary, Mr. Show's Jill Talley has a thankless cameo, and Julianne Moore contributes the most embarrassing performance from an Oscar nominee since Marlon Brando strapped a bucket to his head in The Island Of Dr. Moreau. It would be nice to think that The Ladies Man represents a nadir for Lorne Michaels and company, but if there's one thing SNL has proven again and again, it's that future projects can always get worse.