Movie Review: ‘Tower Heist’

By Bob Garver

“Tower Heist” is one of the bet­ter dumb movies I’ve seen lately. It’s good for some cheap laughs, which is fine because it promises noth­ing more than cheap laughs. A movie like this will never be mis­taken for any­thing of legit­i­mate high qual­ity but it far exceeds bad films with delu­sions of high qual­ity. Movies like “Tower Heist” need to be graded on a curve, not based on how “good” they are, but on how fun they are. Of course, some movies are both “good” and fun, and this isn’t quite one of those movies, but there’s still plenty about it that’s enjoyable.

Ben Stiller (star of many other good dumb movies) plays Josh Kovacs, man­ager of a ritzy apart­ment com­plex in the heart of Man­hat­tan. The build­ing is fully staffed with ser­vants who cater to the wealthy res­i­dents. Other employ­ees include a concierge (Casey Affleck), an ele­va­tor oper­a­tor (Michael Pena), a maid (Gabourey Sidibe) and the world’s friend­liest door­man (Stephen McKin­ley Henderson).

Things are going fine for every­body until wealthy res­i­dent Arthur Shaw (Alan Alda) gets busted by the FBI for finan­cial malfea­sance. Things get worse when we learn that Josh had turned the staff’s pen­sion fund over to Shaw and they get worse still when we learn that the door­man had done the same with his life sav­ings. Josh can’t stand to see Shaw still liv­ing a life of lux­ury on tem­po­rary house arrest and car­ing more about his prized Fer­rari than a sui­cide attempt by the door­man. He decides that he needs to get everybody’s money back and to do that Shaw needs to be robbed.

Josh forms a rag­tag team of dis­grun­tled employ­ees and a dis­placed ten­ant (Matthew Brod­er­ick). They still need some­one with rob­bery expe­ri­ence, Josh quickly decides on his crim­i­nal neigh­bor Slide (Eddie Mur­phy). Slide’s arrival in the story marks the begin­ning of the fun­ni­est stretch of the film: the plan­ning of the rob­bery. In these scenes the dia­logue is sharp and the actors fill their roles to the best of their poten­tial; Mur­phy as the dan­ger­ous one, Pena as the dumb one, Brod­er­ick as the lame one, Sidibe as the unpre­dictable one, and Stiller as the leader try­ing to hold every­thing together by a thread. The only dead weight is Casey Affleck, remind­ing us once again of where the tal­ent went in his family.

The Affleck char­ac­ter is at the cen­ter of an unnec­es­sary, imprac­ti­cal con­flict where he takes over as build­ing man­ager and works against the team despite not hav­ing the respect of any­body with the power to give him the posi­tion. The sto­ry­line could have eas­ily been dropped in favor of giv­ing more screen time to Shaw. Alda does a ter­rific job as the vil­lain and it’s a shame that the film doesn’t do more with the char­ac­ter. One sub­plot that does work is Josh’s rela­tion­ship with the FBI agent (Tea Leoni) in charge of Shaw’s case. I can’t remem­ber the last time I saw a fun­nier onscreen couple.

The cli­mac­tic rob­bery sees the film fall into the same trap as many heist come­dies; get­ting bogged down in the details of the action and for­get­ting to be funny. But on the whole, “Tower Heist” is an enjoy­able enough film. It makes for a fun night at the movies and it’s bet­ter for fam­i­lies than the bar­rage of R-rated come­dies we’ve been hit with this year. It’s a dumb movie, sure, but it doesn’t go so far as to cel­e­brate the fact that it’s dumb. It’s just smart enough to be com­fort­able with how dumb it is.

Three Stars out of Five.

“Tower Heist” is rated PG-13 for lan­guage and sex­ual con­tent. Its run­ning time is 104 minutes.

Con­tact Bob Garver at rrg251@nyu.edu.

Posted by Bob Garver on Nov 11 2011. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.