Rip off the 1%

TOWER HEIST (2011)

Reviewed by Jerry Saravia

"Tower Heist" should have been a rip-roaring action comedy with a great comic cast that would have upped the tomfoolery and absurdity to new heights. As it is, it is only fitfully funny and a bit underwhelming and undernourished but it still packs the occasional wallop.

Ben Stiller is Josh Kovacs, the manager of a residential New York City skyscraper. He plays chess with a wealthy businessman, Arthur Shaw (Alan Alda), who is the owner of a penthouse at the top of this skyscraper. Josh does an admirable job overall with his staff and the patient doorman, Lester (Stephen Henderson), who is hoping to retire within a year. Casey Affleck is Charlie, the concierge who mistakes a Korean woman for Japanese. Michael Pena is Enrique, the newly hired elevator operator. Matthew Broderick is a resident who is about to be evicted. Typical day in the Big Apple.
That is until Shaw is arrested for a Ponzi scheme that involves taking pension funds from the tower's employees. Trouble is that Josh asked Shaw to invest in everyone's pension funds. This leads to a scene where Lester nearly commits suicide by walking over a subway platform (fairly true to life in light of our current economic meltdown). Shaw will get out of jail soon and not pay a penny that is owed to the tower's employees. After Josh, Enrique and Charlie are fired by the General Manager, Josh hatches a plan - rob Shaw's penthouse and get the money hidden in a safe inside a wall. Only trouble is the safe is not where the gold is.

All this planning needs an experienced criminal, which leads to Slide (Eddie Murphy), a thief who can steal anything except he has no clue how to crack open a safe. This leads to Odessa (Gabourey Sidibe from "Precious"), a maid working at the tower whose family is in the locksmith business. How convenient.

Everything leads to an absurd climax that would seem improbable in an "Ocean's Eleven" flick. Let's say it involves dangling a car once owned by Steve McQueen over the side of the tower to...you gotta see it. It is so improbable and cartoonish that you can't help but laugh at it (people suffering from acrophobia, beware).

"Tower Heist" is mildly funny but it is occasionally infused with a profane comic engine by Eddie Murphy in a role he used to play in his sleep. Murphy has fun with the role of Slide, exposing the ridiculous assertion that he can only be remembered by critics for playing a "48 HRS." hoodlum. Murphy is bigger than the film, more talented than almost any other comedian in the past twenty years and his lightning-paced, alert manner in which he rattles off one line after another is pitch perfect. But once he disappears from the screen for long stretches, the movie loses a bit of momentum and purpose. Most nagging thought: why does the film let Josh off the hook when dealing with his employees whom he screwed over with the pension fund faux pas? Yes, Alan Alda plays his most deviously charming and evil role in years but the plot makes it clear that if it had not been for Josh, none of this might have happened.

Ben Stiller is at his most restrained here giving a more nuanced performance than normal. I would have loved more scenes between him and Murphy and Tea Leoni as an FBI agent (both Leoni and Stiller were in the fantastic "Flirting With Disaster"). The movie is still fun but it is not grand, dynamic or engaging fun with comic fireworks. It is more like a Christmas tree celebration at Rockefeller Center with sparklers.