bechdel taser: brett ratner walks into a bar. a steel one. i wish.

Publicly, I state my religion as Stephen Fry. Privately, however, 2011 tipped him into my ‘over-exposed’ bin. I really don’t understand how Christians do it. Their saviour is everywhere, all the time – and I don’t just mean in the spiritual omniscience regard. Even when I can’t buy marked down Cadbury Yule Logs next to Hot Cross Buns, people are finding him on their toast and Madonna’s dating his namesake (that’s how it works, yeah?). But at least he doesn’t narrate quite so many documentaries.

So, Fry was put on the backburner (heh), and my soul was feeling a bit abyss-esque. I needed a replacement deity. I was pretty sold on Bill Murray after reading this but then I visited Highpoint. A shopping centre in Melbourne nicknamed ‘Knifepoint’, with more prams than highschool diplomas among its congregated. I had gone there to buy a block of knives (I have an implicit trust in pejorative nicknames), but I found salvation.

The deity in question is Clusterfluff, Ben and Jerry’s peanut butter ice cream with caramel clusters and both marshmallow and peanut butter swirls.

Perhaps I mean salivation.

So, why am I talking at such great length about something other than movies? Well, I feel bad. Because just two days after my shopping sojourn, I needed an excuse to get more clusterfluff. My absent friend wasn’t responding to my messages that I needed company to compare Albert Nobbs with Jack and Jill, so I found the next worst thing.

Tower Heist.  Brett Ratner is behind Tower Heist. Brett Ratner who was recently pulled from the Oscars thanks to his outstanding displays of homophobia and sexism – rehearsal, apparently, is for ‘fags’, and he has claimed to have forgotten his ex, Olivia Munn, as he ‘banged [her] before she was Asian’.

The film’s trailer made it seem like a fair accompaniment to some clusterfluff-induced brain-freeze, but my insides were recoiling at the idea that I was supporting this deadbeat’s coffers. In the end, I decided I could do more by scorning over it than exacting a one-person boycott.

I was first subjected to 27 minutes of previews. There were a lot of explosions, and if I didn’t actively work to repress movie trailers, I’d be able to tell you the plots of six months worth of movies the studios will lose money on. There were two public service announcements, instructing the audience to avoid doing stupid things. I started wondering how they select the relevant PSAs, as scanning the crowd, I realised I’d never seen so many young men in singlets and chains congregated inside. Conversely, there was an advertisement for Magners Cider so entertaining I worried the film wouldn’t exceed it.

Tower Heist attempts a comedic take on the Mission Impossible oeuvre, with Zoolander, Ferris Bueller, Dr Doolittle, Precious and Ben Affleck’s brother at the helm.  What I had hoped for was another RED – the surprisingly enjoyable group-all-the-old-action-stars-together film from 2010 – with less muscle shots and more one-liners. What it delivered was a First Wives Club aimed at working class men who might be out of work, rather than middle-aged women who might be out of love. I actually loved FWC but Heist fails to match it, gag-for-gag, and its plot holes are too niggling to make any mind-numbing action seem fun.

Unsurprisingly, the film hates women and it fails the Bechdel test. Gabourey Sidibe’s Odessa can crack very heavy duty safes, but her skill was assumed from her father – a locksmith – so we avert any question of a female having a reason to learn such a craft. The Jamaican character spends the film looking for a husband so she can stay in the United States but Odessa’s real low point is eating a piece of cake which she herself had laced with sleeping pills. She doesn’t pass out, thanks to the joy of plot holes, but we do have the ‘pleasure’ of laughing at her crumb-splattered face. After all, fat girl gotta have her sugar fix.

It’s a mystery that Tea Leoni’s Special Agent Denham is even employed. We see her drunk and betraying confidential information, and failing to show any initiative to successfully do her job. The character’s purpose is a romantic foil to Stiller’s Kovacs, and rather than question why a successful FBI agent would be interested in an obsequious security guard, we are asked to focus on the way she swishes her hair and unbuttons her blouse. In my mind, she is actually an alien who infiltrated the FBI to get rid of Scully and Mulder before they found solid proof of extra-terrestrials and was just trying to send up the whole agency in the meantime.

Tower Heist’s brief running time is its best asset. The film may be bloated with egos and mediocrity, but it’s short enough that my uterus didn’t prolapse in a don’t-occupy-Ratner protest. Snaps for the editor on that one. The film starts by sounding out each coming plot-point in repetitive detail, and it’s a fair way into its length that a heist is even mentioned. Heist wanted to be a longer and less entertaining film, but the editor cut away as much as they could without raising eyebrows at a 46 minute running time. Perhaps if they’d gone further, we’d be spared the thoughtless misogyny in the film, but really that just means cutting every scene with a female character.

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