The Details

Tower Heist

Ben Stiller, Eddie Murphy, Alan Alda

Directed by Brett Ratner

Rated PG-13

Beyond the Weekly

Official Movie Site

IMDb: Tower Heist

Rotten Tomatoes: Tower Heist

It takes a good 45 minutes for the characters in Tower Heist to get around to talking about the heist of the Tower, a super-elite apartment building that’s home to some of the richest people in Manhattan. Before that, director Brett Ratner and the various screenwriters take their time laying out a scenario in which nefarious financier and Tower resident Arthur Shaw (Alan Alda) is arrested for defrauding his clients, which happen to include the pension fund of the Tower’s employees. Building manager Josh Kovacs (Ben Stiller), a loyal and dedicated employee for years, finally reaches his breaking point, devising a plan to steal the $20 million getaway fund that Shaw has stashed in his apartment.

By the time Josh works up to proposing this scheme, which involves enlisting a thug (Eddie Murphy) from his gritty Queens neighborhood as a robbery expert, Ratner has spent way too much time establishing a range of not particularly funny supporting characters, many of whom turn out to be entirely irrelevant in the eventual heist. Josh’s actual crew includes a couple of fellow Tower employees (Casey Affleck, Michael Pena) and a financially ruined former Tower resident (Matthew Broderick), along with a Jamaican maid (Gabourey Sidibe) with a talent for safecracking. It’s a half-assed version of the crew from Steven Soderbergh’s Ocean’s Eleven (whose screenwriter, Ted Griffin, is one of the five credited here), with much less style, grace and humor (which is especially egregious considering this is supposed to be a comedy).

In contrast to his prominent billing, Murphy gets little to do and has only one or two funny moments, and Stiller is disappointingly dour as the crew’s leader (he also sports a distracting intermittent Queens accent). Alda shines as the devious capitalist, but there’s not enough meat to the movie’s social commentary for it to qualify as a satire. After the long buildup, the heist itself is disjointed and full of plot holes, although Ratner does get some mileage out of staging it during the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. Despite its star power and timely subject matter, Tower Heist comes off as slick, anonymous and forgettable, which is exactly Ratner’s specialty.