Tower Heist Review

Tower Heist (2011)

Dir: Brett Ratner

With the exception of his unforgivable entry in the X-Men series and the lackluster After the Sunset, I rather enjoy Brett Ratner’s movies. He is a director who is usually seen with much disdain because of just how basic his style of filmmaking is. But I’ve always found them fun in all of their glorious simplicity; in fact I’ll go right ahead and admit that Rush Hour 2 is one of my all time favorite movies. Tower Heist sticks to this simple-minded mentality; it’s a good piece of entertainment but in the end, the director’s most notable trait (keeping his movies as simple and digestible for the mass audiences as possible) is what hurts it the most.

The plot borrows heavily from other movies, specially the Ocean’s Eleven and Fun with Dick and Jane remakes, hell it even has Casey Affleck (from the Ocean’s movies) and Tea Leoni (from Fun with Dick & Jane).  Here, a group of employees of an upper-class, high-security apartment building lose all their money after a wealthy tenant to whom they had trusted all their savings is found to be involved in a ponzi scheme, so they do what every logical group of people would do in this situation: Break into his apartment and steal all their money back. 

The “funny” part of the ordeal is that they’re all pretty much stupid so they decide to hire an “experienced” thief who turns out to be equally, if not more, stupid than they are, not to mention selfish.  We are then presented with scenes such as the one with an old lady approaching the group mid-heist much to their shock and asking them to walk her dog apparently oblivious to what’s happening in front of her only to turn around and walk away as if nothing happened much to the relief of the group. This, like many others in the movie, is a scene that we’ve seen done countless of times in countless of other movies.  It’s a very cliché and formulaic plot.

Heist movies are usually divided in three segments: Set-up, planning and the heist itself. This film doesn’t make it as overly complex as we’re used to see; it doesn’t really demand the audience’s full attention and it doesn’t have a whole lot of factors coming into play, again keeping it all in the simple-minded mentality.  This is not necessarily bad but it keeps it from being a truly exciting and surprising story development. 

Ben Stiller, Gabourey Sidibe, Matthew Broderick, Eddie Murphy, Affleck , Leoni and the rest of the cast do a serviceable job here, never pushing for more than what their characters demand. They’re all equally charismatic and this represents the closest Murphy has been to his glory days. But with so much comedic talent it feels like a miss opportunity, they barely go out of their way to make a line feel special or funnier.

But perhaps we have the script to blame for that. This is a very basic type of comedy, very simple and accessible, but too innocent for its own good, with such a serious subject matter it could’ve been a lot darker and have some more depth to it or at least it should’ve gone full-on with the screwball and physical comedy aspects that are briefly touched here and there. I chuckled a few times but it wasn’t funny per-se. At least it doesn’t go the Adam Sandler “kick in the nuts, shit on the face” path and we have that to be thankful for. 

Brett Ratner and company’s lack of risk tacking is ultimately what hurts this film the most. But for what is worth this is not a bad film, it doesn’t bore and it’s technically competent. It’s a good time killer that will entertain and be almost immediately forgotten once it’s over.