There’s something about Matthew McConaughey that’s not quite right for the part of a serial shagger. He’s undoubtedly handsome — indeed, he was once dubbed the sexiest man alive. He can even act a bit. But charm, it seems, is beyond him, and that is what is required in Mark Waters’s version of Dickens’s A Christmas Carol.

McConaughey plays Connor Mead, a celebrity photographer who thinks marriage is likely to be hell and male-female relationships should be short and sweet. At one point, he dumps three old flames on a conference video while preparing to bed a fourth. He is a proper bastard and gets his oats by the ton from women who are amazingly surprised when he leaves them.

It is only reluctantly that he goes to his nice brother’s wedding, conducted with great ceremony in the same ornate country mansion where The Witches of Eastwick was shot. Once there, Connor maintains a cynical detachment and continues to grope as many women as possible, including the bride’s mother (Anne Archer, regrettably given only one proper scene).

However, he does not touch Jenny (Jennifer Garner), a childhood friend with whom he once had an affair and who is still in love with him. And, going to the gents, he meets the ghost of his old recidivist uncle Wayne (Michael Douglas in shades), who tells him he will now meet three of the women he’s either let down or will do in the future, and it won’t be a pleasant experience.

Gradually, he finds out what a swine he has been and realises that Jenny is the right girl for him. But there’s a lot more to come before the film ends.

The problem for McConaughey, and indeed for the film itself, is the switch Connor has to make from being a crassly selfish bore to the decent chap he was in the distant past. The actor just can’t manage it. You leave the film believing that he’ll let Jenny down again as soon as the wedding festivities are over.

Though it pours the sentiment on at its conclusion, Waters’s film has a nasty misogynist edge, suggesting that women are gasping for cads such as Connor to seduce them. But if the sexiest man in the world had a bit more charm, you could believe they just might.