Everybody’s angry nowadays. The poor hate the rich for killing their jobs, the rich hate the poor for killing their image, the middle class sits in parks and protests against everybody else. All this anger may be bad for our blood pressure, but it sure makes for a good comedy. Which is a point that Tower Heist proves beyond a shadow of a doubt.
Meet Josh Kovacs (Ben Stiller), a lovable working stiff who manages The Tower, the best high-rise in New York. Atop that structure lives its owner, billionaire Arthur Shaw (Alan Alda), who is put on house arrest for securities fraud within the first 30 minutes of the film. Kovacs, displaying quite the savior complex, plans to storm the penthouse and nab Shaw’s secret $20 million stash – not for his own sake, but for the sake of his coworkers.
In an ensemble comedy like this, the plot, its execution and the filmmaking are largely subservient to the quality of the cast and the dialogue. Luckily, this film packs a punch in both categories. The script, though not particularly original or feasible, is actually funny, and it’s unsurprising that the screenwriter (Ted Griffin) also penned the Ocean’s Eleven remake. Stiller carries the audience along on his tide of righteous anger, most notably in his tense scenes with the delightfully slimy Alda. In smaller roles, Matthew Broderick plays a washed-up Wall Street man with his ageless puppy-eyed charm, and Gabourey Sidibe contributes her considerable talent to the dreadfully one-dimensional role of maid and safe-cracker. I know I’m not alone in praying to the studio gods to keep granting her work in coming years.
Eddie Murphy is not, in fact, one of the main attractions of this film. He plays Slide, a petty thief enlisted because no one else knows how to steal. Murphy is funny as ever, but he looks, smells and breathes like a movie star; he’s forgotten how to play a low-rep low-down low-life. His character is little more than a negative stereotype, and Murphy seems much more comfortable when he sheds his wife-beater for an expensive suit in the last part of the film.
Though the film is built on a perception of corporations as money-grubbing soul-suckers, it is unashamed to include countless corporate sponsorships. The supposedly insolvent Broderick wears a sleek Helly Hansen windbreaker,which retails at $140. It’s hard to believe in a premise when the filmmakers don’t bother to support it themselves.
And after a while, the would-be criminals start to loose their sheen of justification. Once the group Kovacs is defending become the crime’s perpetrators, their Robin Hood act seems less self-sacrificing than self-interested.
But then again, if you thumb your nose at vigilante justice, you probably shouldn’t buy a ticket to a movie called Tower Heist. The appeal of this movie is that it not only gives a frustrated public something specific to hate, but it lets us laugh about it – a relief which we all, rich and poor, desperately need.
– Britta Hanson
