Brett Ratner Made Cinema Mediocre Again. Now He’s Coming Back to Profile Melania Trump.

Somehow, Brett Ratner has returned.

After a full decade away from directing movies, Ratner will come back with a theatrically released documentary, already in production and sold to Amazon, about once and future First Lady Melania Trump. Ratner, of course, has plenty of nonfiction experience, having produced, for example, Before, During, and ‘After the Sunset’ – a DVD making-of documentary about his seminal 2004 heist movie After the Sunset.

OK, that’s not exactly fair; Ratner has produced (though not directed) other documentaries, primarily having to do with cinema; topics have included Peter Bogdanovich, Cannon Films, and Romanian appetite for American action films in the 1970s and ’80s. His track record as a producer is more indicative of his overall career as a would-be impresario. While Ratner has directed just ten feature films in the past 30 years, he’s had a hand in several TV series; produced or executive-produced another two-dozen or so films; directed a ton of music videos, including “Christmas in Hollis” for Run-D.M.C. and multiple well-known Mariah Carey clips; and, uh, founded a publishing company, which released such literary touchstones as a reprint of an old Playboy interview with Marlon Brando and a book of Scott Caan’s photography. Perhaps more prominently, Ratner also co-founded the company RatPac, which for a time co-financed nearly every movie on the Warner Bros. release slate.

Much of this – let’s assume Rat Press was on the outs no matter what – came crashing down when Ratner was accused of sexual assault and sexual harassment by multiple women in 2017. Olivia Munn, Natasha Henstridge, and Elliot Page all came forward with various allegations against Ratner during the #MeToo movement. He slunk away, leaving Ratheads hanging as to when he might follow up his middling 2014 version of Hercules, starring Dwayne Johnson.

Now, apparently, the answer is Melania Trump; assuming that a documentary made with Melania’s participation during her ostensibly husband’s return to the presidential office, it seems unlikely to carry much journalistic or narrative heft, despite the insistence that it will tell a “surprising” story. Ratner appears, like a lot of accused abusers, to be casting his lot in with the folks most likely to excuse said behavior. (Ratner has denied all of the accusations, including those witnessed by other actors.)

Then again, Ratner’s never had any trouble finding the money. (It can’t get more on-the-nose than his first feature being literally called Money Talks.) Looking back on it now, Ratner’s mostly-2000s career feels like the inverse of recent blockbuster-director trends, wherein a smaller-scale and artistically promising director gets handed the keys to a Marvel, Disney, DC, James Bond, whatever franchise that’s actually been programmed to auto-drive most of the way. Filmmakers from Barry Jenkins to Chloe Zhao to Guy Ritchie can waste years attempting to inject some smidgen of personality into a pre-established house style. Ratner, on the other hand, tried his best to work with the house style whenever possible, and usually, somehow, managed to make the movie in question worse.

His peak, such as it was, came with a pair of early 2000s titles. The preferable title is Rush Hour 2, which may be the ultimate Ratner movie, not because it’s good, but because there’s only so much Ratner can do to screw things up as Jackie Chan and Chris Tucker do their action-comedy antics – and because there’s only so much he can do to elevate it past buddy-comedy boilerplate, too. It’s a place-filler movie, perfectly acceptable if you liked Ratner’s original Rush Hour — which is currently hanging out in the upper reaches of the Netflix Top 10 — just a little bit bigger and more expensive. Naturally, it remains one of his biggest-ever hits.

And a year later, Ratner was free to put his complete lack of stamp on Hannibal Lecter. The result, Red Dragon, is a fascinating study in the science of mediocrity. This re-adaptation of the first Hannibal Lecter book (originally made as Michael Mann’s stranger but vastly superior Manhunter) assembles one of the great casts of the 2000s: Anthony Hopkins returning as Lecter, opposite Edward Norton as profiler Will Graham, plus Philip Seymour Hoffman, Ralph Fiennes, Emily Watson, Mary-Louise Parker, and Harvey Keitel. It’s assembled like a normal movie. The actors hit their marks. The movie contains no egregiously bad scenes. It also contains not a single good or even particularly memorable one (save perhaps Fiennes chowing down on a painting at the Brooklyn Museum, which of course comes from the source material). In aggregate, and in light of its sterling cast and juicy material, the pervasive mediocrity becomes almost unbearably terrible. (It’s a “better” movie than the divisive Hannibal, and also a much, much worse one.) He pulls a similar trick with X-Men: The Last Stand. It has the same basic cast, style, and thematic concerns as the first two X-Men movies, which it’s sequelizing. Yet Ratner manages to coarsen almost every single aspect of it just enough to make it add up to the worst X-movie by far.

What could Ratner do to further coarsen Melania Trump? Whatever he has up his sleeve, his career already has a bizarre Trump connection. One of his last fiction films, the largely forgettable 2011 caper Tower Heist, was originally pitched by co-star Eddie Murphy as an ensemble film featuring an all-star cast of Black comedians playing guys who team up to rob a Trump property. (It was literally titled Trump Heist.) The film that Ratner eventually made, after numerous rewrites and Murphy’s departure and return, used Trump buildings for certain shots. But the bad-guy target was moved to a then-semi-topical Bernie Madoff figure who had lost the pensions of his building’s employees. In true Ratner fashion, the movie is largely toothless and style-free regardless, with a few amusing moments courtesy of the actors he never had trouble attracting to his projects until the #MeToo accusations came out. (After which his employment of Roman Polanski as an actor in Rush Hour 3, an actual thing that happened, hit a little different.)

It’s fitting, though, that Ratner has volunteered to help further normalize Melania Trump, a woman who has accomplished vanishingly little with the various opportunities presented to her. The entire cinema of Brett Ratner revels in comfortable mediocrity: Do nothing particularly well, maybe oil up some charm in a few important rooms, and be invited to make an impressive variety of movies: starry heist pictures, Jackie Chan extravaganzas, a Hannibal Lecter thriller, a superhero epic, an adventure fantasy, all of which vaguely resemble other, better examples of their genres. He was making Netflix movies before Netflix existed, and it must kill him that his career cratered just before the era of the streaming-movie payday. Imagine how he could have worked his magic on, stay, Ghosted – by which I mean, made the exact same movie, but maybe gotten some more money for himself in the process. He may still be radioactive enough in Hollywood to be passed over for the plum directing gigs he used to collect, but Trump World must have recognized a gift for listening carefully when money talks.

Jesse Hassenger (@rockmarooned) is a writer living in Brooklyn. He’s a regular contributor to The A.V. Club, Polygon, and The Week, among others. He podcasts at www.sportsalcohol.com, too.