Starring: Ben Stiller, Eddie Murphy, Casey Affleck, Matthew Broderick and Alan Alda
Directed By: Brett Ratner
Screenplay By: Ted Griffin and Jeff Nathanson
Story By: Adam Cooper, Bill Collage and Ted Griffin
Produced By: Brian Grazer, Eddie Murphy and Kim Roth
Distributor: Universal Pictures
Rating: PG-13
Running Time: 104 minutes
Website: towerheist.net
Budget: $80 million (estimated)
Genre: Action / Comedy
Release Date: November 4, 2011
Engineered by the men responsible for the Rush Hour series and the Ocean’s Eleven reboot, Tower Heist is essentially a mashup of those films, a politically-incorrect heist flick sporting a sprawling, racially-diverse ensemble cast. It piles broad stereotypes and casual misogyny upon timely anti-capitalist populism, without taking any of it too seriously. If you’ve seen the trailer and know the pedigree, you pretty much know what you’re in for. Tower Heist is exactly the movie you expect it to be.
Director Brett Ratner is often derided for his technical slickness, but the man knows how to please an audience. He’s smart enough to cast well and get out of the actors’ way, focusing his energies instead on wringing the most production value he can from his already-enormous budgets. While his style often borders on self-parody, he makes damn sure every last dollar is visible on-screen.
In Tower Heist, that’s almost literal: the film opens with an enormous hundred dollar bill occupying the entire screen. The image is actually the bottom of rooftop pool of Alan Alda, a Bernie Madoff-like Wall Street investor who occupies the penthouse of The Tower apartment building in Manhattan. Sixty stories below, a ragtag group of multi-ethnic employees move like clockwork to ensure the residents of The Tower receive the ultimate in personal and professional service.
They are led by Ben Stiller, who is tightly-wound and efficient, but still cares about each of his staff members like they’re family. That’s actually true of desk clerk Casey Affleck, a sad-sack brother-in-law that Stiller must constantly cover for while Affleck prepares for the birth of his first child. The rest of the staff is drawn more broadly: the friendly black doorman on the verge of retirement (Stephen Henderson), the street-smart Mexican elevator operator (Michael Peña), the Jamaican maid in need of a green card (Gabourey Sidibe), the Russian law student, the Chinese shoeshine man.
When the friendly black doorman tries to commit suicide after the entire staff loses its retirement money in Alda’s Ponzi scheme, Stiller vows revenge. He visits Alda, who is enjoying a relaxing house arrest in his luxury apartment, and goes off the deep end, taking a golf club to Alda’s most prized possession: a vintage sports car once owned by Steve McQueen. This gets Stiller fired, but wins him the respect of FBI agent Téa Leoni, who accidentally inspires a plan to steal $20 million from a hidden safe in Alda’s apartment.
He assembles his team from The Tower’s castoffs: Affleck, Peña and Matthew Broderick as an evicted ex-Wall Street trader. Since it’s obvious they don’t know the first thing about crime, Stiller enlists the help of neighborhood thief Eddie Murphy. Returning to the kind of fast-talking character that made him famous, Murphy is absolutely energized here. He crackles with life every time he’s on screen, and the scenes of him training the team are easily the best part of the film. Unfortunately, the majority of those scenes have already been shown in the film’s trailer, and the tightly-plotted script gives Murphy few comic opportunities once the crime begins.
The actual tower heist in Tower Heist is laughable, defying logic, common sense and at times, physics, but it is an entertaining series of individual sequences. Ratner’s showpiece is a 21st-century take on Harold Lloyd’s Safety Last, with his heroes dangling precariously from a sports car on the side of The Tower while the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade marches unsuspectingly below. The action that follows is largely nonsensical, but still manages to draw both laughter and thrills once disbelief is properly suspended.
The film is deliberate and economical, setting up exactly the details it needs for the story to pay off later. A late-in-the-game twist that pits Affleck against his former team is one of the few structural missteps; it adds nothing, and is quickly jettisoned. Each of the ensemble cast gets its moment to shine – particularly Broderick as the nebbish who gains back his courage – and Ratner wraps up all of the loose ends cleanly. Except, of course, for Murphy, whose misuse in the latter third of the picture is the film’s biggest head-scratcher.
For better or worse, Tower Heist is exactly the movie you expect it to be. That doesn’t mean it’s not done well.
3.5 Stars (out of 5)
