He Hate it

Is Spike Lee's She Hate Me the worst film I've ever seen? I think it may well be, for I feel used and tawdry after witnessing this shameful spectacle in a way that ordinarily bad films seldom make me feel. And I want my time back, oh yes I do.

In a way, my sentiments mirror those of the film's protagonist Jack Armstrong (Anthony Mackie). He's the buppy (black, upwardly mobile young professional) vice president of a dodgy biotech company called Progeia, which is developing a vaccine against Aids.

When the firm's technical director (a cartoon Kraut called Schiller) plunges from the window of its Manhattan offices, Armstrong learns the FDA (Federal Drug Administration) has refused the vaccine a licence. His bosses ( Woody Harrelson and Ellen Barkin) are then revealed as Enronstyle fraudsters, and Armstrong tentatively blows the whistle on them. He is immediately disappeared by corporate Big Brother: he's fired, his bank accounts frozen, and he is blacklisted from future employment.

Enter Fatima (Kerry Washington), Armstrong's former fiancée, who dumped him for a Sapphic lifestyle. Fatima and her partner Alex (Dania Ramirez) want to get pregnant and are willing to pay Armstrong $10,000 a pop to do the necessary.

After hemming and hawing, he obliges. This opens the floodgates to a tide of lesbians seeking impregnation, including the daughter of a mafia Don, a rap star, an Ivy League bluestocking, and so on.

But oh, poor Jack feels used by all that commercial sex. Eventually he is arraigned before the SEC ( Securities and Exchange Commission), where he gives an impassioned speech, and refuses to grass on the Don. All the lesbians have lovely babies, and after a certain amount of brouhaha it is clear that Armstrong is going to settle down with both Fatima and Alex, who have managed to abandon their homosexuality sufficiently to be his babymamas, as well as give him hot troilism and girl-on-girl action for the rest of his unnatural life.

What a sad, stupid, exploitative, incoherent, ridiculous mess this is, full of dumb stereotypes and puerile assumptions. It hurt me even to write that narrative down but I've done it as a public service to you, my readers, so that you need never, ever even entertain the notion of seeing this film.

If you do, by some bizarre accident, find yourself trapped in a cinema showing She Hate Me, all I can suggest you do is shut your eyes because the Terence Blanchard jazz score is quite good. Frankly, I think he should disown the film and demand that it be recut as an entirely blank screen.

Spike Lee's best films have either been cartoonish and burlesque - Do the Right Thing, She's Gotta Have It - or dark and panoramic: Malcolm X, Summer of Sam.

He was never a likely candidate for satire: he lacks the correct phrasing or rhythm. Indeed, I'd go so far as to say that he doesn't know what satire is. In HL Mencken's formulation - the best there is - the aim of satire is to "afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted". In She Hate Me, almost all the cast are comfortable, black, white, Asian-American or Hispanic; gay or straight.