Stop, thief! Somebody stole Eddie Murphy's career!

Ok so I admit that I never saw Night at the Museum, which may well render me unqualified to write about the news that Christopher Guest will appear in the sequel -- yes there's gonna be a sequel -- playing Ivan the Terrible. I am, however, qualified to speculate on whether or not Guest -- whose work in such gems as This Is Spinal Tap and Waiting for Guffman has placed him among the retinue of modern day comic geniuses -- is, like totally selling out or if he's pulling a Colbert in The Love Guru, i.e. elevating cinematic dreck to a higher plane by virtue of his involvement. It's a toughie. Could be he's doing both.

Film industry relationships are complicated. Most relationships are, but at least with marriages and dating, we at least have some frame of reference. Our friends or family members have been through the same things we have, and can share their experiences with us. And if not, we can always watch the wack-jobs on Maury to make ourselves feel better. Let's look at the relationship troubles between DreamWorks SKG and Viacom Inc.'s Paramount Pictures, as reported by Zap2it, in terms we might be able to relate to.

Brett Ratner must really hate me. Of the top three simple pleasures I enjoy in everyday life -- food, wine and movies -- the man has to take some kind of sick pleasure in ruining at least one of them every few months. As I haven't seen him at any L.A. restaurants in a while, I suppose I wasn't that surprised to read that he's setting out to ruin yet another movie franchise that I love. I reported last week that the man who in slaughtered the third X-Men movie had just signed on to helm the 4th Beverly Hills Cop film, which will once more star Eddie Murphy. That alone was enough to put a damper on my day, but now he's revealed the icing on the cake: He's aiming to gear the film toward a PG audience.

If Tower Heist feels a lot like Ocean's Fourteen, that's not entirely accidental. After all, both this movie and the Ocean's pictures involve an all-star crew of crooks attempting to rip off a wealthy mark that has wronged them. Beyond that, the movies share a screenwriter (Ted Griffin, who wrote Ocean's Eleven, though not the sequels) and a co-star (Casey Affleck). But here's the way to tell them apart: the Ocean's adventures were directed by Steven Soderbergh, while Tower Heist is a Brett Ratner joint. That means that the jazzy, inventive visual palette that Soderbergh brought to his movies has been replaced by a workmanlike style that's professional without being particularly interesting. The heist at the center of Tower Heist also pales in comparison to the elaborate schemes that Danny Ocean and his accomplices pulled off. Their plans were ridiculous enough to be believable -- this one is just ridiculous. Still, thanks largely to the cast (some of them anyway), Tower Heist isn't the botch that Ratner's last comic thriller, After the Sunset, was. It's a serviceable bit of studio fluff that keeps your eyes, if not your brain, occupied for 100 minutes. (Too bad the studio didn't follow through on its initial plans to release the film on VOD three weeks into its theatrical run; the movie will likely play much better at home on your TV screen than in the theater.) Here's how the individual members of this crew rate: