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She Hate Me
EMAILPRINTSony Pictures Classics
Generally unfavorable reviews
Based on 36 critic reviews
How did we calculate this?
Based on 14 votes
Read user comments
Rate this movie >
Movie Info
Genre(s): Comedy | Drama
Written by:
Spike Lee
Michael Genet (also story)
Directed by: Spike Lee
Release Date:
Theatrical: July 28, 2004
DVD: February 1, 2005
Running Time: 138 minutes, Color
Origin: USA
Summary
RATING: R for strong graphic sexuality/nudity, language and a scene of violence
Starring Anthony Mackie, Kerry Washington, Ellen Barkin, Monica Bellucci, Jim Brown, Reynaldo Rosales, Jamel Debbouze, and Brian Dennehy
When biotech executive Jack Armstrong (Mackie) gets fired and branded a whistle-blower, his desperation to make a living and the suggestion of a former girlfriend lead him into the baby-making business. Between the attempts by his former employers to frame him for securities fraud and his dubious fathering activities, Jack finds life, all at once, becoming very complicated. (Sony Pictures Classics)
Also On Metacritic
FILM: 25th Hour 4 Little Girls Bamboozled Clockers Crooklyn Do the Right Thing Girl 6 He Got Game Inside Man Jim Brown: All American Malcolm X Summer of Sam The Original Kings of Comedy
Also On The Web: Internet Movie Database View The Trailer Official Studio Site
What The Critics Said
All critic scores are converted to a 100-point scale. If a critic does not indicate a score, we assign a score based on the general impression given by the text of the review. Learn more...
Christian Science Monitor David Sterritt
This intensely topical satire tackles a wide range of important issues, from corporate whistle-blowing to the toll sexual license takes on stable family structures.
Read Full Review >Chicago Sun-Times Roger Ebert
It is exciting to watch this movie. It is never boring. Lee is like a juggler who starts out with balls and gradually adds baseball bats, top hats and chainsaws. It's not an intellectual experience, but an emotional one.
Read Full Review >Chicago Tribune Michael Wilmington
A daring, entertaining, but somewhat disappointing affair, something of an overreacher despite Lee's usual pyrotechnics and a brilliant cast.
Read Full Review >Boston Globe Wesley Morris
A belligerent little sex farce roiling inside an otherwise inconsequential lampoon of corporate America, the movie is rude and ridiculous, fearless up to a point, and breathtakingly hungry to provoke.
Read Full Review >New York Post Lou Lumenick
A messy -- but uproarious, timely and provocative -- farce.
Read Full Review >ReelViews James Berardinelli
She Hate Me is a mixed bag, but at least it's interesting and almost never boring.
Read Full Review >Los Angeles Times Kevin Thomas
Lee's energy never flags, and She Hate Me resonates with authority and impact and daring, but the messages it sends are mixed.
Read Full Review >The Onion (A.V. Club) Scott Tobias
While not quite a red herring, the corporate stuff serves as a prelude to a long-winded and mostly embarrassing treatise on alternative lifestyles and filial responsibility.
Read Full Review >Variety Scott Foundas
A scabrous, provocative and often funny social satire about the American dream, Spike LeeSpike Lee's flawed but fascinating She Hate Me addresses everything from corporate malfeasance to the African AIDS epidemic, barely catching its breath in-between.
Read Full Review >USA Today Mike Clark
This 140-minute I-don't-know-what-it-is unravels like a ball of yarn after a bout with a tiger on Colombian catnip. Lee exhaust me.
Read Full Review >Philadelphia Inquirer Carrie Rickey
Like most Lee films, She Hate Me is gasp-worthy, with something to offend everyone. I will not say that I liked it. I will say that like "Bamboozled," it exasperates and resonates.
Read Full Review >Empire Angie Errigo
Undermined by a plot that doesn’t make sense and plays like three-and-a-half genre movies fighting for screentime in one overlong one.
Read Full Review >Wall Street Journal Joe Morgenstern
It's too much for a feature film, and too little, but it certainly isn't dull.
Salon.com Charles Taylor
The problem with She Hate Me is that there's no playfulness in Lee's provocations. He doesn't have the style or the naughty joie de vivre that you need to make a sex farce.
Read Full Review >The New Republic Stanley Kauffmann
It all turns out a bedraggled mess. Lee presumably had two ideas, one an exposé of pharmaceutical greed, the other a sex comedy: then he decided that neither one would make a film in itself and came up with the lame idea of combining them. What makes the resulting blunder even worse is that, intrinsically, almost every scene is directed well.
Read Full Review >Chicago Reader J.R. Jones
Spike Lee's fans have learned to take the bad with the good, but this is pretty damn bad.
Read Full Review >Village Voice J. Hoberman
Director Lee throws cold water on his own overheated fantasy scenario by having Mackie mope through every scene. What's fascinating is how She Hate Me perversely trumps its own perversity.
Read Full Review >TV Guide Maitland McDonagh
If it weren't all so cluelessly sleazy it might be funny.
Read Full Review >LA Weekly Jon Strickland
Lee hits almost every note wrong, from Terence Blanchard's overplayed score, to underdeveloped roles for Ellen Barkin and John Turturro, to stale one-liners.
Read Full Review >New York Daily News Elizabeth Weitzman
It's hard to say what's most disappointing about She Hate Me, Spike Lee's absurdly - and arrogantly overlong comedic drama. But there are plenty of options to choose from.
Read Full Review >Rolling Stone Peter Travers
When a Spike Lee film doesn't fly, it sinks like a stone.
Read Full Review >Miami Herald Rene Rodriguez
Lee remains a superb entertainer -- like Oliver Stone, he's incapable of ever being boring -- but in She Hate Me, he comes dangerously close to seeming trivial, a crank-for-crank's-sake.
Read Full Review >Seattle Post-Intelligencer D. Parvaz
What is this movie about? Is it a morality tale? Is it about the complexity of romantic love? Parenthood? Accepting the often-blurred lines of our sexual orientation? Is it about the role of race in white-collar crime? What?
Read Full Review >The Globe and Mail (Toronto) Liam Lacey
One of the most preposterous efforts by any major director in recent memory.
Read Full Review >San Francisco Chronicle Mick LaSalle
About as awful as a film can be without being the ultimate awful, which is boring.
Read Full Review >Washington Post Ann Hornaday
The most misguided, ill-conceived and lamentable film.
Read Full Review >Washington Post Desson Thomson
It's sheer agony to sit through, and not for the reasons Lee would relish. It's just bad.
Read Full Review >Dallas Observer Melissa Levine
Every once in a while, a film comes along that so blatantly disregards emotional authenticity that one fears for the sanity of its director. She Hate Me is just such a film, and Spike Lee is its director and co-writer. Artless, sensationalized, didactic and often downright silly.
Read Full Review >The Hollywood Reporter Kirk Honeycutt
How can a director as savvy as Lee make so many errors of judgment regarding taste, tone, intention and dramatic structure?
Read Full Review >The New Yorker Anthony Lane
The mélange of plots, subplots, reveries, gags, cartoons, dirty bits, and hissy fits points to a work that is structurally modelled less on the classic narratives of cinema than on, say, a portion of Russian salad.
Read Full Review >Portland Oregonian Karen Karbo
Given the abundance of tedious sex in She Hate Me it's no wonder the whole thing's such a turn-off.
Read Full Review >Austin Chronicle Kimberley Jones
The politest way to assess Spike Lee's latest polemic is to call it too ambitious. "An unholy mess" might come closer to the truth.
Read Full Review >The New York Times Stephen Holden
Spike Lee carries his political exasperation beyond outrage into chaos. The carelessness with which he hurls his feelings about hot-button topics onto the screen is the filmmaking equivalent of last-ditch marketing: grab everything in sight, roll it up into a big messy mud ball, and hurl it against the wall, hoping that something sticks.
Read Full Review >New York Magazine Peter Rainer
Spike Lee’s She Hate Me is his worst movie ever--even worse than "Bamboozled," his self-serving indictment of modern minstrelsy, which at least was worth arguing about.
Read Full Review >Entertainment Weekly Owen Gleiberman
She Hate Me manages to be at once racist, homophobic, utterly fake, and unbearably tedious. This time, it's Spike Lee who's doing the bamboozling.
Read Full Review >What Our Users Said
The average user rating for this movie is 5.5 (out of 10) based on 14 User Votes
Note: User votes are NOT included in the Metascore calculation.
Alisha gave it a9:
I love loved she hate me. I did get a little bored for a second but I mean what movie doesnt have a boring part in it. This movie has got to be the sexiest movie I have ever seen. Nothin I love better than to see two women gettin it on! Plot was great and entertaining! Forget what all these snoody critics are saying its not you're average hollywood movie and thats what makes it so great.
Francisca C. gave it a9:
I got it; I liked it. Movies are for entertainment and that I was. Comedies are comedy and an exaggertion of life. Two thumbs up.
Dan H. gave it a10:
I thought that this movie was brilliant. It was first and foremost, tremendously entertaining, which is why people watch movies anyway. Secondly, it was brilliantly absurd in a very self-absurd way. People write scathing reviews of this movie and it's logic and propose that Spike Lee has lost his mind, but honestly Spike Lee knows how absurd and illogical aspects of this movie are. Since I am not an eloquent and poignant writer, however, see Roger Ebert's review of this film (which is one of his best, proving once again that he may be the wisest man in America).
Kuumo D. gave it a0:
This was the worst movie yet that SPIKE LEE.. has made.. for one main reason.. He tried to go into on topic he truly knows nothing about it. Being a black lesbian. He made fun of .. and completely made the lesbian lifestyle a joke. First and foremost Lesbians don't sleep with me .. for enjoyment and the sure as hell don't become bi-sexual b/c there mate might be.. at the end Alex's character in a real world outcome would have left that twisted offer of having Fatima and Jack as lovers.. with two children..
p t gave it an8:
I got it. I enjoyed it although I didn't think the scenarios were realistic at all. I think Spike spoke volumns on so many things, do we always have to have an earnest depiction to make a point?
Jeff F. gave it a0:
What was spike lee thinking about?
Mark B. gave it a 7:
She hate it, he hate it, nearly everyone hate it, and I'm not completely sure why. Spike Lee's multibarreled satiric take on Enron, lesbianism, sperm donorship, the Bush administration and (not surprisingly) race relations in America has been slammed nearly totally across the board (note the Metacritic score) for being strident, shrill, self-contradictory, sexist and thematically confused, but keep in mind, folks, that it's Spike Lee we're dealing with, and therefore, what did you expect, anyway? The man is nothing if not thoroughly unpredictable (which is part of the fun of watching him), and it's a fact of life that for every perfectly disciplined, modulated film he makes (Do the Right Thing, Get on the Bus, 25th Hour), he's going to produce one that's completely and totally berserk (e.g. Summer of Sam or Bamboozled)...and it'll usually immediately follow one of the films in the former category that nearly everyone respects if not totally liking it. In substance, style and subject matter, Lee is nothing if not in your face; remember, this is the director who caused millions (OK, thousands) of moviegoers to complain to the theater projectionist because he deliberately filmed part of Crooklyn through a distorted lens in order to forcefully communicate its young heroine's alienation. Lee's biggest flaw is that of many writer/producer/directors, only maybe more so: he just doesn't know how or when to edit himself! Thus, in She Hate Me we have an incredibly poignant monologue (delivered by Jim Brown in his best screen performance EVER) about Frank Mills, the Black security guard who uncovered the Watergate burglary and whose life was subsequently ruined because of it...unnecessarily followed by a childish, garish reenactment featuring some guy in a Nixon Halloween mask! Warts and all, I found this tale of an honest but disgraced Black business exec (Anthony Mackie) forced by sudden unemployment and other circumstances to become a one-man stud service for lesbians who desire children to be frequently funny, touching and surprisingly evenhanded in its treatment of most of the characters. Having read several reviews before going in, I wasn't prepared to learn that ALL the movie's major women are multidimensional and have vulnerable or sympathetic qualities, including Ellen Barkin's foulmouthed, powersuited superior. Critics and moviegoers have accidentally or deliberately missed the point that Lee is making that Mackie's customers avail themselves of his service not only to get pregnant, but to give themselves permission to have a once in a lifetime heterosexual experience and satisfy their curiousity. (These sequences, capped with Look Who's Talking-style animation, provided me with some of the biggest, uh, belly laughs of this moviegoing year.) I may really be going out on a limb to state this, and Lee himself may not be especially thrilled should he ever read this, but on occasion this film reminded me of another (I think) unjustly maligned film, Richard Fleischer's uncompromising 1975 Deep South melodrama Mandingo, in which all Black men with certain physical characteristics are seen and treated by pre-Civil war society almost exclusively as either money-making or sexual objects; apparently, according to Lee, America hasn't progressed very much since then! Lots of tone shifts characterize this almost 2 1/2 hour movie; it's definitely at its weakest in the final reel, in which Lee, who has told Roger Ebert that he's not a Frank Capra fan, turns uncharacteristically Capraesque in a courtroom scene involving most of the major players--but this is followed by a wrapup that shows us yet ANOTHER completely unpredictable side of this bracingly, often admirably impossible-to-pigeonhole filmmaker. Who would've guessed that Spike Lee of all people could be such a romantic?
