She Hate Me

Spike Lee is a director who, via his production company Forty Acres and A Mule, likes to tackle non-commercial side projects like Bamboozled (2000) alongside his more mainstream films such as Inside Man (2006). However, why he thought this film, scripted by him with Michael Genet (who appears as the main character's brother) from an original story by the latter, needed to be made is anyone’s guess.

It starts out reasonably enough, looking like an anti-corporate thriller with a high-flying Afro-American (Anthony Mackie) as a whistleblowing ex-VP of a shonky Enron/WorldCom style pharmaceuticals company headed up by honkies Woody Harrelson and Ellen Barkin. Once our hero is sacked the film then segues into a story of the out-of-work yuppie accepting $10,000 a pop, so to speak, for impregnating the many lesbian acquaintances of his ex-fiancé before returning to a rah-rah do-the-right-thing SEC hearing scene and winding up with a feelgood ending, with he, his ex and her girlfriend and their offspring as one happy family. Oh, and insert a recreation of the discovery of the Watergate break-in and a symbolic burning-at-the-stake of Frank Wills, the black security guard who discovered it.

Money is, of course the linking element in the two halves of the story, as is signalled in the excellent opening titles, but why a large slab of the running time is devoted to the main characters servicing a dozen or so beautiful lesbians (including Monica Bellucci) is unclear. Lee, whose work I admire, is well known for his political hectoring but here the material is so generic, the narrative so literally tied to the moral lessons that one wonders where is the twist. Is Lee parodying himself and black culture? There is always an element, but no more, of that in his work but there is no reason to think that overall Lee does not want us to take him seriously.

Anthony Mackie, a kind of Eddie Murphy without the “hee hee” laugh, does a good job in the central role surrounded by a strong cast of both familiar and unknown faces in would-be satirical comedy that despite some good aspects (including Terence Blanchard's score) never gets close to being either challenging or amusing.

FYI: David Bennent, made famous as a child actor for his appearance as Oskar in The Tin Drum (1980), plays the German research scientist.

 

Want something different?