The kamikaze melodrama Shadowboxer rivals Lady in the Water as the year's most uncompromised film: it's awful on its own terms. Whatever else one might say about Lee Daniels' directorial debut -- that it's a raging, purple-veined monstrosity, and that the cast should sue for damages -- there's no chance that it ever came face-to-face with a focus group.

If it had, it would have cleared the room sometime between the ass-rape-with-a-pool-cue scene and the moment when sullen assassin Mikey (Cuba Gooding Jr.) coaxes his cancer-stricken partner and stepmother, Rose (Helen Mirren), into bed with a striptease. Once upon a time: Rose rescued Mikey from his abusive father; Mikey's gratitude found expression in his Oedipal crush and a willingness to do whatever Rose says -- including sparing their latest target, Vickie (Vanessa Ferlito), the pregnant wife of a psychopathic gangster (Stephen Dorff). Vickie and her newborn get integrated into Rose and Mikey's dysfunctional family, and the film laboriously marks time until the bad guys show up.

With its skanky, perfume-ad photography, Shadowboxer is oppressively garish. Its wild swings between the lurid and the lachrymosely sentimental are much uglier, however. Daniels must reckon his melted potboiler to be bold, transgressive stuff, but its provocations fall flat in the absence of a point.

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