Widely perceived as the spiritual successor to Eddie Murphy, Martin Lawrence is a massive commercial phenomenon, pocketing eight-figure sums per movie for his hyperactive antics – and there’s no reason to doubt that the proudly braindead Black Knight will do anything other than brilliant business.

It would be misleading to describe the film – a time-travel yarn – as having any sort of plot, but it involves Lawrence shaving his ears and plucking hairs from his nostrils a lot, as he plays Jamal Walker, a janitor at a run-down LA theme park named Medieval World.

A risible sequence of mishaps then teleport the imbecile to 14th-century England, where Jamal jive-talks endlessly to a sequence of bemused medieval punters who mistake him for a Moor.

Black Knight has been mutilated by film critics in general with the same vengeance that greeted the guy’s previous opus Big Momma’s House, but MOVIEHOUSE can’t rid itself of the butter-hearted opinion that there is something pathetically loveable about Lawrence – sorta like a stinking dog that you keep around out of sympathy and because he’s so reassuringly predictable.