With a title like Tower Heist, the basic plot and setting are literally spelled out and hand-fed to you. It goes to reason that a bare-bones moniker like this is trying to acknowledge the loaf upfront to make way for the true meat of the movie. The “meat” then is the grouping of three generations of comedians: Alda, Murphy, and Stiller, all primed to combine their unique comedy styles into one super Voltron of Comedy!
Only their parts don’t match; one guy is a Voltron, one’s a Power Ranger and the other is a Ben Stiller. Without any sort of comedic chemistry, Tower Heist achieves the amazingly mundane task of actually living up to its title. Stiller is the manager of the eponymous tower, an upscale apartment building in New York he always calls “The Tower.” Alan Alda is a tenant of The Tower whose recent indictment for insider trading leaves all the rube employees of The Tower pension-less. Murphy plays the petty thief who aids in the heisting of the pension money back from Alda, who is on house arrest, in the Tower. Thus, Tower Heist.
And that, boys and girls, is how movies are made!
Poorly. That’s how movies are made poorly. Brett Ratner directs what could be his last (google him + Oscars) from a script by committee that’s a grab-bag of recession headlines grafted onto a rip-off of the plot of the novelization of a straight-to-video knock-off of Ocean’s 13. Aside from the by-the-books Robin Hood tale, which uses more cliches than my own boilerplate review, the watered-down performances come off as the faintest essence of each comics’ once-popular persona. It’s like Ben Stiller and Matthew Broderick based their careers on the “Nobody calls me chicken” scene in Back to the Future, each iteration yielding less than the last. Then there’s Eddie Murphy and Gabourey Sidibe, a street-wise thief and sassy Jamaican, respectively. Whether their roles are racist or post-racist or whatever, the stereotypes, including Alda’s rich-old-white jerk, never go beyond the industry standard, and worse, aren’t funny. The one highlight is Michael Peña, a stereotypical street-wise fool of a bell-hop, and the freshest comic of the bunch.
Which is all academic, cause really, there’s so little to this movie other than extreme mediocrity to evoke any reaction whatsoever. If TV channels still exist in the next couple of years, catch Tower Heist on TBS late at night and see if it doesn’t leave you feeling entirely indifferent.
