Review: Tower Heist

Tower Heist is one of those movies that looked hilarious in the trailers, but made me a little nervous. I saw the trailer and my first thought was that it could have contained every joke, and the rest of the movie would be terribly flat. Coming across at first as an awkward Ocean’s Eleven/A Fish Called Wanda hybrid, I was pleasantly surprised with the film. A word of advice – don’t doubt it; this movie is hilarious throughout. Tower Heist is a film about Josh Kovacs (Ben Stiller), a hotel manager at The Tower who gets roped into a Ponzi scheme by one of the building tenants, Arthur Shaw (Alan Alda), and loses all of his employees’ pensions (including Casey Affleck, Stephen Henderson, and Gabourey Sidibe). When Kovacs tries to confront Shaw, he ends up losing his job. In an attempt to get back at him once and for all, Kovacs bands together with the concierge (Affleck), a tenant who’s being evicted (Mathew Broderick), the newly hired bellhop (Michael Peña), and Kovacs’s whacked out, criminal neighbor (Eddie Murphy) to find Shaw’s hidden stash of money to pay back all of his employees. Action-wise, the movie is kind of low-key for a Brett Ratner film, but the New York City skyline and fancy, upscale apartments areeasy on the eyes. . The setting for the final scene is brilliant, and without giving too much away, I’ll say it’s way up there on the list of crazy stunts I’ve seen in recent movies. The screenplay, written by Ted Griffin and Jeff Nathanson, is hilarious the entire way through. Every line that Mr. Fitzhugh (Broderick) and Enrique Dev’Reaux (Peña) deliver is hysterically funny in the context of their specific character voices. Fitzhugh is a man on the verge of giving up when Kovacs approaches him. When he’s informed of his eviction, he responds with, “I’m thinking of becoming a male prostitute,” in a matter-of-fact voice that only Broderick could muster. Later he has another line, simply, “If you need me I’ll be living in this box.” His borderline depressive-turned-criminal character is such a simplistically brilliant construction, on both the part of the writers and Broderick himself. He and Peña, the over-eager, childish, hopeful voice in the situation, are great supporting actors to Stiller’s driven, underdog leading man and Murphy’s twisted criminal. Though there’s a pretty heavy chess metaphor throughout, the film is well-written overall and doesn’t go too overboard on the fancy symbolism that can sometimes take away from what really happens in a film. The story is well structured, the characters are believable and likable, and the actors, writers, and director deliver all around. Although I didn’t set the bar that high for this movie, I was absolutely impressed. I laughed more than I thought I would and saw more famous faces than I was expecting. Keep an eye our for Ben Stiller, alongside Jonah Hill and Rosemarie DeWitt, in the upcoming Neighborhood Watch, a sci-fi comedy written by Seth Rogan and Evan Goldberg about suburban dads who uncover a conspiracy. Eddie Murphy will be in the early 2012 film, A Thousand Words, a dramedy about a man who learns he only has 1,000 words left to speak before he dies. Ratner will produce Mirror Mirror, the upcoming Snow White film staring Julia Roberts and Lily Collins, along with Ted Griffin’s Solace, starring Anthony Hopkins, about a doctor who hunts down a serial killer, which is currently in preproduction.