This, I'm very much afraid, is Baise-Moi Lite for flabby liberals, precisely the sort of muddled, PC, good-taste, almost-angry feminist issue movie that gives the mainstream a bad name. The shame is that it has two excellent performers, Stockard Channing and Julia Stiles, doing their very considerable best, and writer-director Patrick Stettner summons up an intriguingly oppressive corporate culture in which the action is played out.

Channing is a tough executive, staying out-of-town in a faceless hotel. Psychologically unglued by rumours that she is about to be laid off, she fires and humiliates her assistant, Stiles. But then they are thrown together by events. They sort-of have a generational conflict; they sort-of toy with a sapphic situation; they sort-of take revenge on a guy who may or may not be a rapist, or potential rapist. Ho hum. It's the sort of thing that Neil LaBute might have put some heat under. This is lukewarm.