She Hate Me

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.

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.

Chicago Tribune Michael Wilmington

A daring, entertaining, but somewhat disappointing affair, something of an overreacher despite Lee's usual pyrotechnics and a brilliant cast.

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.

New York Post Lou Lumenick

A messy -- but uproarious, timely and provocative -- farce.

ReelViews James Berardinelli

She Hate Me is a mixed bag, but at least it's interesting and almost never boring.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Baltimore Sun Chris Kaltenbach

A mess, but it means well.

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.

Chicago Reader J.R. Jones

Spike Lee's fans have learned to take the bad with the good, but this is pretty damn bad.

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.

TV Guide Maitland McDonagh

If it weren't all so cluelessly sleazy it might be funny.

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.

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.

Rolling Stone Peter Travers

When a Spike Lee film doesn't fly, it sinks like a stone.

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.

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?

The Globe and Mail (Toronto) Liam Lacey

One of the most preposterous efforts by any major director in recent memory.

San Francisco Chronicle Mick LaSalle

About as awful as a film can be without being the ultimate awful, which is boring.

Washington Post Ann Hornaday

The most misguided, ill-conceived and lamentable film.

Washington Post Desson Thomson

It's sheer agony to sit through, and not for the reasons Lee would relish. It's just bad.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.