Reviewed
by Lamar Kukuk
11/5/11
Sometimes
a movie can seem like it’s being released at the perfect time when in fact
nothing is farther from the truth. Much has been made in the press
of how Tower Heist, the new Brett Ratner action comedy that pits
the defrauded staff of a high-rent apartment building against the multi-millionaire
who stole their pensions, is the perfect movie for this moment of anti-Wall
Street frustration and Occupy protests. But the truth is that Heist
is mildly entertaining, forgettable piffle that gets caught with one foot
in the kind of star vehicle comedy it would have been five or ten years
ago and one in a darker vision of itself more appropriate to this moment
in time. I laughed, I followed along, I really hoped no one would
fall off that building into the middle of the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade.
But my thoughts after seeing Tower Heist had a lot more to do with
the movie it’s not than the one it is. Go in knowing what you’re
going to get: it’s a cute way to kill two hours, but you’re not going
to get any vicarious victory over The Man from this All Things To All People
studio creation.
An
apartment at the Tower (really the Trump Tower) is the most expensive real
estate in the world, and manager Josh Kovacs (Ben Stiller) presides over
a staff that caters to its wealthy tenants’ every whim. His favorite
is the man in the penthouse, investment banker Arthur Shaw (Alan Alda),
who’s just been arrested for fraud by FBI Special Agent Claire Denham (Tea
Leoni). It seems that while Josh had asked Shaw to manage the building’s
pension fund and doorman Lester (Stephen McKinley Henderson) gave him his
entire life savings to invest just months before, he’d squandered all their
money and there’s virtually no chance any of it will be recovered.
Lester tries to kill himself and Josh heads for the penthouse in a rage.
He smashes the windows out of Shaw’s expensive car and is fired on the
spot along with concierge Charlie (Casey Affleck) and elevator operator
Enrique (Michael Pena). Told by Claire that the authorities are hoping
to find a stash of twenty million or so Shaw should have had close at hand,
Josh hatches a scheme and brings in Charlie, Enrique, disgraced financial
expert Mr. Fitzhugh (Matthew Broderick), safecracking maid Odessa (Gabourey
Sidibe) and the only criminal he knows, former daycare classmate Slide
(Eddie Murphy): they’re going to bust into Shaw’s penthouse during
the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade and take back his money. But there’s
no such thing as a perfect plan: Slide hatches his own scheme to
get the money and Charlie wants out after being hired as the new manager.
With the law ready to let the powerful Shaw walk, only Josh and his misfit
gang have any hope of making him pay.
Ironically,
Tower Heist probably would have been a better movie when it was
less timely: drama keeps trying to break out all over the place,
and if there weren’t extensive reshoots (characters often seem to be going
back and forth between a universe where Lester did kill himself and one
where his attempt failed), there were certainly extensive rewrites.
While Stiller is pretty good in the lead and does the best job of balancing
fun and gravitas of the major players, Affleck is horribly miscast and
can’t make Charlie the funny incompetent guy the script wants him to be.
Murphy has been playing these kind of wacky criminals on and off for thirty
years, and he has no trouble making Slide both amusingly small-time and
just a little bit dangerous, and Broderick is nicely understated in a role
in which you’d fear he’d go too far over the top. Pena makes a funny
dimwit, but Sidibe shouldn’t try playing Jamaican again anytime soon.
Typical of a movie that’s often pulling its punches, we know how far Alda
could go with Shaw, and he doesn’t really do it, instead coasting on the
iconic punch his casting alone carries (I couldn’t help but think how effective
Zeljko Ivanek, who has a single scene as Claire’s boss, would have been).
The
crime itself isn’t exactly Ocean’s Eleven-caliber: for all
the talk of The Tower having the world’s most impressive security system
and staff, they’re all circumvented pretty easily through the strategic
use of birthday cake. And the events of the last few scenes just
don’t exist in the same reality. On the one hand, we’re led to believe
that someone must take the fall for what transpired because actions have
consequences, and on the other to accept the idea that the hotel staff
could be made whole through a gift that requires every one of them to commit
a crime to get their reward (if I handed everyone reading this a stolen
Faberge Egg, how many of you could actually turn it into money without
getting arrested or left bleeding in a ditch by the crook who stole it
from you?).
Don’t
get me wrong, the lead actors have nice interplay, the climactic action
makes good use of the Parade and the heights in play when trying to rob
a New York penthouse. Tower Heist consistently had my attention
and I laughed a lot. But there’s a whole lot it could have done better
even when we’re not hip deep in scary economic times. When movie
characters promise me they’re going to strike back at the rich, I ask for
a little more. Hopefully times are not so far away when we can simply
watch a movie like this and say “That was OK for what it was supposed to
be” and leave it at that. Because, you know, it’s OK for what it’s
supposed to be. |
