Watching Brett Ratner's Tower Heist, I got the impression that the people who wrote its final script worked from the premise: what would the heist in Ocean's 11 be like if the guys who pulled it off were a bunch of blue-collar schlubs instead of super-slick professional thieves?
The result is an often fun and rather silly comedy caper film which, thanks to some clever casting, manages to stay afloat for the entirety of its running time, but, due to some sloppy writing, only just.
Ben Stiller plays Josh Kovacs, the building manager at a posh New York apartment building, the most affluent resident of which is penthouse owner Arthur Shaw (Alan Alda), who, early in the film, is put under house arrest for swindling about $2 billion in Bernie Madoff fashion. Among Shaw's victims, unfortunately, are Josh and just about the rest of the building's staff, whose pensions Shaw misappropriated. Having been a loyal valet to Shaw for a decade Josh is at first incredulous, but when he sees Shaw's indifference to the revelation that the building's doorman tried to step in front of a train he realizes the truth and in his anger smashes a highly expensive classic Ferrari which Shaw has in his penthouse. Having lost his job, Josh is approached by the lead FBI agent handling Shaw's case, Claire Denham (Tea Leoni) who buys him a drink and, in the course of their conversation, reveals that the Bureau is still searching for Shaw's stash of cash, considering that he has cleaned out just about all of his bank accounts.
Josh, having worked for Shaw for a decade, believes he knows exactly where this special stash is hidden, and in order to steal it he recruits his obnoxious, small-time crook neighbor Slide (Murphy) and a motley assortment of conspirators, namely, three of his co-employees at the tower, his brother-in-law Charlie (Casey Affleck), chambermaid Odessa (Gabourey Sidibe), and elevator operator Enrique (Michael Pena), and finally, a former Wall Street wizard who was recently evicted from the tower, Mr. Fitzhugh (Matthew Broderick).
As heist movies go, this is certainly not the most clever. For me, the beauty of the Ocean's 11 remake (of which Affleck, incidentally, is a veteran) was how effectively the writers, director and actors sold the idea of the heist before it even happened to the extent that when it did happen, I was so blown away by how the characters pulled it off that I didn't even bother to ask how some of the things they did were even possible. There was a real magician's sleight-of-hand to the planning and staging of the whole thing.
In this film, Ratner is far more preoccupied with two things: 1) getting the audience to hate Alan Alda's Madoff-like charlatan and in the process to sympathize with Stiller and the rest of his blue-collar crew, and 2)milking his cast, from Stiller to Murphy to Broderick to Pena, for as many laughs as he can. This is good for a fair number of laughs, but the heist itself goes from unlikely to absurd in pretty short order as a result. To his credit, Ratner really tries playing to his actor's strengths: Stiller does the everyman he has done so well since the late 1990s, Murphy plays the foul-mouthed con man he played in the 80s, and Broderick seems to be recycling the mousy accountant he popularized on stage in the musical version of The Producers (at least, based on what I've seen from the largely ignored 2005 film version of that play). At least Affleck played against type; from the willing conspirator in the Ocean's 11 remake and its sequels he went to being the reluctant one in the group.
Still, it was good to see Murphy once again play the fast-talking scoundrel he popularized in the 80s, if in a slightly watered-down, PG-13 version, as opposed to the R-18 version that invariably had a more colorful vocabulary. It was surprising to see that the privilege of dropping the film's lone F-bomb went to Broderick, who as the former "one percenter" who suddenly finds himself as one of the less fortunate 99% was a heck of a lot of fun to watch. His meltdown in one of the film's climactic scenes, where Fitzhugh is asked to grab the bumper of a dangling car (don't ask), is comedy gold. Oh, and Tea Leoni still looks smokin' hot at 45.
It's certainly not the most memorable heist movie (or movie, for that matter) to come along in awhile but until Eddie Murphy goes full-on Axel Foley or Reggie Hammond it'll do, and it certainly was nice of Ratner to shift from Chris Tucker's annoying Murphy knock-off act that as seen in the Rush Hour movies in favor of the real deal, even if he does feel a little bit like a parody of himself.
Rating: 3/5
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