In addition to being one of America’s most celebrated directors, Spike Lee is one of its most productive, with more than two dozen feature films, documentaries, and television films to his credit along with innumerable shorts, commercials and music videos. Unfortunately, sometimes this productivity has led to a decrease in consistency. Lee has made a number of masterpieces in his career, but he’s also made his share of stinkers, the most notorious of which was 2004’s She Hate Me.

Now, if there’s one word that would never be used to describe Spike Lee, it’s timid. After all, he’s the man who in only his second feature made a campus musical about skin color (School Daze), who made a racially-motivated riot the climactic sequence of Do the Right Thing, and who made the first Hollywood film to actually address 9/11 (25th Hour). In addition, Lee has always been driven by current events. In the words of another Lee, the late Arthur, “the news today will be the movies of tomorrow,” and with She Hate Me, Spike Lee addressed many hot topics of the day- same-sex parenting, Enron, corrupt pharmaceuticals companies, the stereotype of the sexually-powerful black man, the then-recently-disbanded XFL, and the declining state of African-American families.

Sounds like a lot, right? The trouble is that Lee doesn’t quite know how to deal with it all. As a result, She Hate Me is all over the map, not only story-wise, but tonally as well. In one scene, the film’s protagonist, Jack (Anthony Mackie), might be having a heartfelt conversation about values with his father or his best friend. In the next, the film will become an outrageous sex comedy in which Jack beds down the entire starting five of a woman’s basketball team, powered only by Viagra and Red Bull. For long portions of the film, Lee seems to almost forget about the insider-trading scandal in which his former boss has implicated him. The film has no real direction or momentum, so it devolves into one damn thing after another, and by the time Jack has been called before a Senate subcommittee, we’ve long since thrown up our hands.

Another problem is that the comedic moments don’t work. There’s nothing inherently funny about the film’s edgiest and most infamous plot strand- Jack’s side job as a hired stud paid to impregnate rich lesbians (including characters played by Kerry Washington and Monica Bellucci, among others) at $10,000 a pop. So it falls to Lee to make these scenes work, and he’s not up to the task. Looking back at Lee’s career, I can’t help but notice that many of his worst-reviewed films (She Hate Me, Girl 6, the better-than-its-rep Bamboozled) are comedies. That seems a little strange, considering how wonderful She’s Gotta Have It is, and how funny his non-comedy films can be- remember the old guys on the corner in Do the Right Thing or Denzel Washington’s unconventional detective in Inside Man?

So why does Lee have such a problem with outright comedy? In She Hate Me, it just feels like he’s trying too hard. It’s not enough that Jack sleeps with five lesbians in one night- Lee goes overboard to make these scenes as outrageous as possible, crafting quick-cutting montages of Jack’s conquests, turning the women into overpowering stereotypes who call him “bitch boy” (among other things), and then showing Jack and his “magic wand dick” giving them all massive screaming orgasms in spite of the fact that they're supposed to be lesbians. If that’s not enough, Lee includes several animated sequences in which a sea of sperm (all bearing Jack’s face) race toward a waiting egg. It all gets to be too much after a while.

In the end, what’s the point that Lee is trying to make? I think Lee’s message is a simple one, and not a new one for him- “do the right thing.” Trouble is, it takes roughly 2 ¼ hours (!) to get to that point, by which time we’ve long since gotten lost amid all the zany sex antics and the whistleblowing scandal and the wacked-out digressions in the plot (John Turturro riffing on Don Corleone, anyone?). As sprawling and ambitious as Lee’s best films can be, they always maintain a clear focus, but that focus escaped him in She Hate Me, and this as much as anything else is what sinks it. Yet, as bad as it is, it’s certainly never boring. Given the ill-fitting parts of the story, it’s hard to imagine it working at all, but most filmmakers would have tried to rein it in and play it with a straight face. Lee goes in the opposite direction, and while it still doesn’t work, I’ll have a hard time forgetting it. Whether that’s a good thing, I’ll leave for you to decide.