The New York Times
October 28, 2011z
By, DAVE ITZKOFF
WHEN you present a comedy achievement award to Brett Ratner, as the Friars Club did on a recent Saturday night in Manhattan, who shows up for the ceremony? You get the entrepreneur Russell Simmons and the billionaire Ronald O. Perelman, who roasted Mr. Ratner for his tastes in fashion models and baggy pants; Michael Barker, co-president of Sony Pictures Classics, who praised Mr. Ratner’s omnivorous cinematic appetite; and Richard Belzer, the comedian and “Law & Order: SVU” star, who briefly summoned the Friars Club abbot Jerry Lewis on his cellphone.
Finally a genuinely humbled Mr. Ratner, dressed in a suit and sneakers, took the dais and told the motley gathering in a tone both sentimental and self-deprecating, “I was not the best student, but I was the hardest-working kid that I know, and it paid off.”
Now 42, Mr. Ratner has never fully shed his reputation as the hard-charging hustler who talked his way from New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts to the hip-hop video scene to Hollywood. His relentless drive has not only earned him an eclectic coterie of famous friends but also an estimable directorial résumé: his three “Rush Hour” action comedies, released between 1998 and 2007, have together grossed more than $850 million worldwide, alongside hits like “Red Dragon,” his 2002 prequel to “The Silence of the Lambs,” and the 2006 comic-book blockbuster “X-Men: The Last Stand.”
Yet, as Mr. Ratner knows as well as anyone, his accomplishments have come with their own price tag: his genre hopping has seen him dismissed as a dilettante and a directorial gun for hire, and his outsize pop ambitions — not to mention a proudly hedonistic streak that has carried over from his Miami Beach upbringing — haven’t always played well in an industry where success is seen as a zero-sum game.
