The Popcorn King

Ultimately, the person most responsible for making sure people see and like Rush Hour 3 is the director whose seven feature films have generated more than $1 billion in global ticket sales, putting him in the elite company of Spielberg, Robert Zemeckis, M. Night Shyamalan and a select few others who have reached that milestone before their 40th birthdays. The first two Rush Hours alone account for $600 million of that tally, while, in the six years since Rush Hour 2, Brett Ratner has directed popular entries in two other long-running franchises: Red Dragon (2002), the fourth film derived from Thomas Harris' Hannibal Lecter novels, and X-Men: The Last Stand (2006), the third and highest-grossing in the series of Marvel Comics adaptations. Barely a decade after making his feature-film debut, he has navigated a remarkable ascension of the Hollywood power list, earning the respect of such moviemaking elder statesmen as Warren Beatty (with whom Ratner developed an unproduced remake of John Cassavetes' The Killing of a Chinese Bookie) and Roman Polanski (who gives a cameo performance in Rush Hour 3) in the process. Yet if Ratner is undeniably one of the few "name" directors of his generation, his remains a name more likely to be found in the gossip columns than the culture pages.

There, Ratner is routinely depicted as a poseur and a fool — a self-absorbed lothario more adept at staging parties in the basement disco of his Benedict Canyon mansion than he is at making movies. Like his contemporary, Michael Bay, he is anathema to cinephiles and other high-culture guardians. Critical reaction to Ratner's films usually runs the gamut from dismissive to contemptuous — so much so that, in his positive review of Red Dragon, Roger Ebert sounded almost apologetic for having liked the movie. ("To my surprise," he wrote of Ratner's direction, "he does a sure, stylish job.") At the L.A.-based gossip Web site Defamer, where Ratner can scarcely order a soft-serve yogurt without becoming headline news, he has been lumped together with the likes of Bay, Crash director Paul Haggis and rocker-turned-filmmaker Rob Zombie and branded a "fauxteur."

Ratner, of course, isn't the first commercially successful filmmaker to be denied serious artistic credibility — much the same could be said of Spielberg and Ron Howard early in their careers. Were that the case, it would be easy enough to understand, given that Ratner specializes in the kind of unapologetically populist "popcorn" movies that almost never win awards or garner rave reviews. No, the curious thing about Ratner is the uniquely vicious tenor of the criticism he engenders, as if he didn't deserve his success and the perks that come with it; as if to be seen in the same room with Paris Hilton were an unforgivable sin; as if, quite frankly, he were enjoying his life too much.

"Whatever envy somebody is harboring — and most people are harboring at least a little bit of envy — Brett is going to bring it out of them," says Jay Stern, the former New Line executive who now runs Ratner's production company, Rat Entertainment. "He's living the dream. He has a tremendous amount of fun. He doesn't hide the fact that he has fun. He enjoys life to the hilt, and if people aren't enjoying life to the hilt ... envy's going to come up for them."

But is it merely envy that explains why, in my career as a journalist, I have never been greeted with as many expressions of skepticism, bafflement and outright disbelief from colleagues and friends as I have since first announcing I was working on this story? "You want to write about him?" they have asked, not infrequently followed by, "Did he really fuck Lindsay Lohan?" All of which, I must admit, has only served to redouble my interest. Most of the time when you tell people about a filmmaker you're profiling, all you get is a noncommittal "Oh" or an uncomprehending "Who?" But with Ratner, everyone — especially, I find, those who've never met the man or even seen many of his films — has an opinion.

It is a level of scrutiny, it must be said, that Ratner helps to bring upon himself. "The traditional Hollywood image of the director is the quiet guy in the background who's the puppeteer, not the guy who's out there in front of everybody," says Davis, who has produced or executive-produced four Ratner films. "That's who Brett is. But so what?"

"He seems to be almost an effervescent symbol of popular culture," adds director James Toback, who cast Ratner as himself in his 1999 urban drama Black and White. "And it's as if by being someone who says, 'This is where we are today in popular culture,' that means you're not taking things as seriously as you should. With Brett, the irony is that he's smarter than the people who think that way about him."