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Lee's reach exceeds grasp

She Hate Me tries to do too much, hampered by a zigzag plot line and lack of logic, but even so, director Spike Lee manages to be compelling.

Spike Lee juggles too many chain saws with She Hate Me, and the result is a mesmerizing mess.

Nobody will accuse Lee of lacking ambition. Taste? Quite possibly. Cohesion? Absolutely. But certainly not ambition, in a movie that begins with declaring President Bush as phony as a $3 bill, and ends with a sensual threesome pledging loyalty, if not sex, to each other. In the halls of Congress, no less.

In between, Lee draws clumsy parallels between the stories of African-American corporate whistleblower Jack Armstrong (the All-American boy from the old radio show, get it?) and Watergate security officer Frank Wills, who uncovered the burglary that eventually toppled President Nixon. But wait, there's more.

She Hate Me is also a rant against the Enron and Martha Stewart scandals in one scene and a booty call sex farce in the next. For good measure, Lee tosses in John Turturro as a mobster with a Godfather fetish, completing his usual equal opportunity offensiveness toward Italians, homosexuals and, well, anyone who isn't Spike Lee.

Yet, even with a zigzag plot and arch performances, the ludicrous forays into animated sperm cells and Nixon bullies, and a climax that would make Frank Capra blanch, She Hate Me fascinates on a strange level. It's the proverbial car wreck we can't stop gawking at, the zit on a nose that can't be ignored.

Jack works for a pharmaceutical company on the brink of a vaccine for AIDS. The boss (Woody Harrelson) and his steely v.p. (Ellen Barkin, not a good thing) are scheming to corral stocks after the FDA approves the drug. When that is denied, the company crumbles in Enron style, and Jack becomes a scapegoat because he wouldn't play along. His high life must end unless he gets a new job.

It shows up at his apartment door, sending She Hate Me into a precarious shift in tone. Jack's former flame, Fatima (Kerry Washington), and her lesbian lover, Alex (Dania Ramirez), want a baby. They'll pay Jack $10,000 to provide the sperm. Fatima wants it delivered the old-fashioned way, which doesn't sit well with Alex. Soon, Jack has numerous lesbians requesting the same service at the same price. Lee's linking of prostitution and capitalism is so overt that it's laughable. As the sexual encounters become more explicit, the corporate connection fades. Just as we're getting settled into smutty fun, She Hate Me reverts to the boardroom dramatics, then Lee's wishful thinking that Jack and Frank Wills are two peas in a pod.

The question constantly arises: How far will Lee go? Not only with the sexual themes - which stop short of enlightenment - and the material ripped from headlines, which amounts to the filmmaker's clucking about how wrong it all is. But also with individual missteps that seem poised to become the movie's next central focus. Turturro's scenes are painful, yet there's something compelling in his loyalty to Lee and his struggles to make something funny or threatening, to no avail.

For brief moments, many of those qualities about She Hate Me that we'll remember as irritating are actually interesting. The Watergate fantasies materialize abruptly, so we're braced for results that never come. The idea that so many lesbians would forsake their values to jump into Jack's bed is a male fantasy gone psychotically wrong. Sometimes we just get the impression that we're watching a formerly great talent step off the cliff, jump the shark, whatever you wish to call it. As a viewer, I can't help wondering if Lee hate me.

Grade: C-

Director: Spike Lee

Cast: Anthony Mackie, Kerry Washington, Ellen Barkin, Woody Harrelson, Jim Brown, Ossie Davis, John Turturro, Brian Dennehy, Monica Bellucci, Chiwetel Ejiofor

Screenplay: Michael Genet

Rating: R; strong sexuality, harsh profanity, nudity, brief violence

Running time: 138 min.