Tower Heist (Ben Stiller, Eddie Murphy, Alan Alda, Casey Affleck, Tea Leoni, Matthew Broderick) – Totally implausible. Total fun. Tower Heist is just another addition to a timeless genre of movies known as the “Heist” films. Everyone has their favorites from the Rat Pack’s Ocean’s 11 to the Clooney/Pitt/Damon version of the movie of the same name. I liked Clooney’s Welcome to Collinswood, David Mamet’s Heist, and Clint Eastwood’s Kelly’s Heroes.” There are plenty of others. The best of the genre contain some humor, and while this one is played mostly for fun, it is still at its heart a heist movie.
Welcome back to adult movies, Eddie Murphy. One of the great, wasted talents of our times, Murphy cut his chops on Saturday Night Live and went on to do some hysterical films. Then there was this lag, which ultimately was filled with kid-oriented schlock and then voice-overs in great animated movies like the Shrek films that earned him lots of money but caused his on-screen career to spiral downhill. He broke back out with an Academy Award-nominated performance in Dreamgirls.
Here, he teams with no-miss Ben Stiller, who plays John Kovacs, the building manager of a tony Upper West Side (or is it Upper East Side?) condo building. He’s the master of a crack staff that serves every need of its residents. He is tireless, efficient, and beloved, even by the penthouse occupant, Arthur Shaw (Alan Alda), a Bernie Madoff type who ends up doing just what Madoff did, Ponzi scheme and all. When Shaw is exposed, the film hits high gear. After all, Shaw was entrusted with investing the building staff’s pension funds. Kovacs melts down, vandalizes Shaw’s prize possession, and gets fired.
So he sets out to break into the condo and find the money that he is sure Shaw stashed in order to make things right. He enlists a few of his most loyal employees but they aren’t thieves. So he also recruits a petty thief (Murphy’s “Slide”) from the neighborhood (I told you it was implausible). The rest is mostly fun with lots of one-liners. All I promise is that they break in; there are some ridiculous stunts and special effects; and it turns into a typically harmless Stiller film. Brett Ratner, who directed the Rush Hour movies among others, keep it light and makes Tower Heist an easy 104-minute afternoon.
But the film has fallen pretty flat at the box office. Last I checked, it was approaching $50 million but cost about $75 million. It continues the “Matthew Broderick curse,” an amazing phenomenon where movies with Ferris Bueller (whoops, I mean Mr. Sarah Jessica Parker) seem to tank. Look at the stars with whom he has appeared (Jim Carrey in Cable Guy, Laura Linney in You Can Count on Me, Reese Witherspoon in Election, Meg Ryan in Addicted to Love, and Nathan Lane in The Producers, and you can’t believe how badly these films did at the box office. Some of these were excellent films, but if it were up to me, he wouldn’t be in my movie.