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June 6, 2005
Ratner X You know what? I don't even care anymore. When Moriarty at Ain't It Cool broke the story last week about Brett Ratner replacing Matthew Vaughn as director, I lost all my interest in X3 in that instant. Just like that. No violent, furious, reactionary hysteria from me. Now that it's official, Brett Ratner is directing X3, I shrug. Whatever. Best not to get bent out of shape about things you can't do anything about. I loved Bryan Singer’s X-Men, a passionate, intelligent (if incomplete) character study of people (not stereotypical superheroes) with superpowers. I loved his driven and ambitious X2: X-Men United even more. I championed Singer's X-Men five years ago when many were underwhelmed and I was thrilled at how X2 deepened the story and characters. Singer abandoning the mutants for his dream of directing Superman didn’t bother me; he had a good run and I think the X-material would benefit from a new perspective. I was looking forward to Matthew Vaughn helming X3. I thought his Layer Cake was very well done, but that isn’t what sold me. What Vaughn had to say in his interviews about his angle on how to do a comic book movie is what won me over. He sounded like he had vision and a set of balls. The X-Men franchise would have benefited from his brashness and edge. Vaughn said all the things I wanted to hear. Of course, I’d been burned before. Last year, Rob Bowman talked a good game with Elektra, and then he shoved a pointy sai right up my ass when I watched his picture in January. Still, I liked Vaughn and I was sorry to see him go. Look who we get instead. Enter Ratner. I'm sure when I see the trailer next spring, X3 will look kind of neat. It will look pretty enough because Ratner is good at that. Maggie Grace (of TV's Lost) will look hot as Kitty Pryde, so will Anna Paquin when she returns as Rogue, and I'll be distracted by that. He'll get one, both, or all three counting Rebecca Romijn-Stamos in bikinis, I'll bet. Maybe the script is good, maybe it sucks. It doesn't really matter. I'll see it regardless because that's what I do. The thing about Ratner is, he doesn't make outright abominations. He's not Paul W.S. Anderson or Uwe Boll. Ratner's movies are cinematic fast food, bad at worst, decent at best; you think it’s tasty at the time until you quickly realize it didn't nourish you in any way. Rush Hour 1 and 2 are bad movies carried by Jackie Chan’s chop socky bewilderment and Chris Tucker’s motormouth. The Family Man is a servicable, one-note drama, Red Dragon is a blatant paint by numbers copy of Silence of the Lambs, and After the Sunset is flashy, forgettable garbage entertainment. Ratner's filmography has not been outright shit (as far as I know, I never saw Money Talks but I've seen everything else) but he's never made anything that can be classified as genuinely good. Studios like him because he’s competent and more importantly, he is compliant - he'll do whatever they ask because he has no vision of his own. He's not an artist. Ratner's biggest problem is that he's a simpleton. He shoots for the obvious because that's all he understands, and then he pumps up the sex and the lights and the sounds and the "comedy" because he thinks like a dumb teenager. He keeps a side career as a music video director and his sensibility is MTV all the way - more sex, fast cars, big muscles, big tits, whatever's hot, hip or cool at the moment. He doesn't understand subtext, nuance, a story within a story. Whatever he's doing is what he's doing and nothing more. Gone will be much of the allegory, the kinetic interpersonal relationships that deepened the X-characters and made these superpowered mutants believable as living and breathing people. With Ratner calling the shots, X3 will work on one level; even if the screenplay has multiple levels, Ratner will shoot the most obvious one. Ratner likes the obvious, the flashy, the loud. X3 will look pretty and move fast and you won't give a shit after it's over. Or possibly even during. Ratner always manages to direct actors who are better than he himself is as a director. Reports indicated that Anthony Hopkins and Edward Norton ran the Red Dragon set and did whatever they wanted, with Ratner's encouragement. X3 will likely be a similar situation. Ratner will be surrounded by good-to-great actors in X3 – Sir Ian McKellan, Patrick Stewart, Hugh Jackman, Anna Paquin, Halle Berry, Kelsey Grammer, etc. - and he will get out of their way and let them do their thing but he won't be able to guide or help them. He certainly won't elevate them. They will carry him. As will his producers, his editor, his composer, the writers, craft services, and the Teamsters. If X3 works, he probably won't be the main reason but he'll gladly take the glory and the money. Sometimes I hate Ratner. I don't wish death upon him or anything, but I do frown at his inexplicable success. Am I jealous of him? Yeah, what of it? I don't care for his work or the lofty position in Hollywood he has managed to achieve through no good reason when one regards his body of work. He's just not good enough at his job to be where he is, the so-called A-List of movie directors. He is not right for X-Men. Still, I can't blame Ratner for taking the X3 gig. Ratner loves big movies, big stars, big premieres, big money, glory, fame. He lost the chance to direct Superman years ago and now this is his chance for the big superhero payday. Avi Arad trumpeting Ratner’s unjustified A-List status as a “coup” for FOX, as “trading up” from the departed Vaughn is laughable. Arad should know better. There are two sets of moviegoers: the people who don’t know or care who Brett Ratner is, and the other group, who do know Ratner and hate him. There’s no middle ground here. Why piss off the second group of people by bringing Ratner in to helm a sacred cow like X-Men? Yes, Ratner is A-List, but what was he hired for? It seems like Avi Arad, Lauren Shuler-Donner, and the people at FOX who hired Ratner did so because they need to make the studio’s announced 2006 release date for X3. With only nine weeks of preproduction before the start of shooting in August, they wanted someone who could slap X3 together fast and with a minimum of fuss so that they could have a big superhero picture to go right up against their former X-Men director Bryan Singer's Superman. They didn’t want someone with big ideas, a unique vision, or a forceful personality, they needed a guy who could shoot this fucker right away, make it look good, and not cause problems. The old adage goes, "Do you want it fast - or do you want it good?" When Singer was in charge, FOX wanted X-Men good. But by signing Ratner, FOX is really telling us they just want X3 fast.
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