It seems a long time since Spike Lee's clued-up, searingly topical and corruscatingly funny movies about black America were a must-see.

Time has blunted his edge and the lean social commentaries of yesteryear have bulked up into extended whinges instead of rapier insights into the plight of the dispossessed.

This offering - which bizarrely pairs corporate skullduggery with sex and procreation - hits an all-time low begging the question is there anyone out there who would actually want to watch it?

Charisma-free Anthony Mackie plays Jack Armstrong, the mild-mannered vice president of a multi-national corporation that thinks it's just discovered an antidote to HIV.

Good news, you may think. But no. Jack's big pal - a vertically challenged German research doctor - knows all's not well with the drug trials…so he throws himself out of a 40th storey window.

It also transpires that the company board - displaying the management style of Enron and the personnel policy of the Ku Klux Klan - has been insider dealing and necks are on the block.

They need a fall guy…and it's inevitably black Jack who finds himself barred from the building, his assets frozen and facing the rap for the bosses' greed.

However, help is at hand with the appearance of ex-fiance and latent lesbian Fatima (Washington) who wants kids and is willing to pay Jack $10,000 a pop for his sperm.

Hard-up, so to speak, Jack agrees the deal and then Fatima ups the ante by introducing him to other grrrlfriends desperate to conceive. It's easy money with the only outgoings being Viagra and Red Bull.

The chippy Lee once memorably cast doubt on white director Michael Mann's suitability to helm a biopic of Cassius Clay. So quite how he squares this with his portrayal of the world of lipstick lesbians is a difficult one to call.

The subtext is that the priapic Jack is just the guy to sort out these dykes and, in the process, showing that as a corporate whistleblower he's the perfect role model for black American men.

Hysterical where he used to be subtle and contrived where once natural, this spirit-sappingly slow rant employs a blunderbuss rather than a scalpel to nail its targets and the result is predictably a terrible mess.

"The American public are a bunch of f*****g morons," declares company lackey Ellen Barkin. If they bother going to see this they most certainly are.