Directed by Spike Lee. Starring Anthony Mackie, Kerry Washington, and Monica Bellucci. Rating unavailable.

Sure, I (mildly) defended Bamboozled, from 2000, as a slapdash provocation dealing with race and television, but this time around, the once-promising Spike Lee's trademark eclecticism has slid into full dog's-breakfast mode, and the results are less than tasty.

She Hate Me starts out as a corporate thriller, with a pharmaceutical upstart called Progia--nominally working on an AIDS cure but actually bilking shareholders--standing in for Enron. You know the company is up to no good when you see that its head honchos are played by Woody Harrelson (in slick huckster mode) and Ellen Barkin (channelling Martha Stewart). Progia's straight-arrow VP is a handsome African-American striver named John Henry Armstrong, nicknamed Jack (Anthony Mackie), and he's set up to take the fall when things unravel after the grisly suicide of the outfit's top scientist, played in a weird cameo by David Bennent, who was the stunted man-child in The Tin Drum.

What a perfect setup, then, for a comedy about a self-doubting stud who takes 10 grand a pop to impregnate the lesbian pals of his ex-fiancée! Say what? Not only does the film's tone shift 180 degrees when the ex, played breathlessly by Kerry Washington, shows up at Jack's door with her hot Latina girlfriend and their indecent proposal, it continues to perambulate like that for an excruciating 138 minutes.

Don't like that subplot? How about the one involving Jack's pointlessly squabbling parents (Jim Brown and Lonette McKee)? Then there's the Mafia princess (Monica Bellucci) who gets our hero--the Sperminator?--roped in with a suave don played by Lee regular John Turturro. He's here, it seems, for the sole purpose of doing a bad impression of Marlon Brando in The Godfather--and I mean that literally. Well, Turturro also helps round out the ethnic stereotypes that pass for characterization in a film that portrays lesbians as bosom-heaving glam queens just waiting for the right man to straighten them out.

But wait, there's more! You want fantasy scenes reconstructing the discovery of the Watergate break-in and other cinematic non sequiturs? Look no further. How about endless montage sequences with Jack traipsing around New York to the music of Miles Davis--as a break from Terence Blanchard's faux-melancholy score, which otherwise never shuts up.

Even the title is a reference that goes nowhere, having been lifted from The Bride of Frankenstein, when the monster realizes that Elsa Lanchester will never grab onto his neck bolts. That's a small point, but one that conveys Lee's elevation of the trivial to pseudo-profundity with a jaw-dropping lack of discipline at every turn. Oh, in case you can't tell, me hate this movie.