Ratings
The Daily: 1 of 5 Stars
Rotten Tomatoes: 60%
More on 'Tower Heist'
IMDB | Official Website
On some basic level, the critic’s job is simple: Ascertain, as best you can, the artist’s intentions. Judge the work according to how successfully those intentions were realized. Scribble conclusions. Repeat until senescence.
But what do you do in the case of Brett Ratner, the only director currently working in Hollywood who can be said to have absolutely no intentions at all? For practical reasons, this shouldn’t even be possible — the modern film production requires so many gaffers and extras and European investor dollars, so many top-line stars with top-line constraints on their time, so many people working more or less 24 hours a day for periods of up to two or three years, that there must, you would think, be a reason, some kind of idea that everyone can point to as the pretext for staging the multimillion-dollar enterprise in the first place.
But if there is any recognizable thought or goal or vision behind Ratner’s newest, “Tower Heist,” it did not manifest itself at the screening I attended. The vague topicality of the film — a Ponzi schemer by the name of Arthur Shaw (Alan Alda), who happens to have been born in Queens like Bernie Madoff, makes off with the pensions of the staff of his lavish building, who then decide to rob him in order to get their money back — only highlights this fact. Shaw could be the Sheriff of Nottingham or the smoke monster from “Lost,” for all that the specifics of his villainy matter.
Facing off against Shaw in a literal game of chess (because “Checkmate!” is the most valuable of screenwriter koans, I guess) is Ben Stiller’s Josh Kovacs, who listens to radio programs on wine and cheese pairings in the mornings and who, as manager of the building, cleverly loses at board games to the wealthiest of the structure’s wealthy tenants. Kovacs — who inexplicably maintains a dingy apartment in the blue-collar Astoria neighborhood despite his job running what we are told is the “most expensive real estate in North America” — is the benevolent Main Street to Shaw’s Wall Street, and when revelations of Shaw’s theft surface, Kovacs wastes no time in pummeling Shaw’s vintage Ferrari with a blunt instrument. Take that, 1 percent!
For this offense, he is promptly exiled from the building, along with his accomplices, Casey Affleck’s Charlie, a concierge, and Michael Peña’s Dev’reaux, an elevator operator. Despondent and broke, Kovacs rallies his gang — which comes to include Chase Fitzhugh (Matthew Broderick), a Yale graduate and former building resident whose apartment is foreclosed upon, and Slide (Eddie Murphy), an old neighborhood acquaintance and small-time criminal — to raid Shaw’s penthouse, inside which, a friendly FBI agent (Téa Leoni) has informed Kovacs, should be stashed some significant cash portion of Shaw’s ill-gotten gains.
We won’t spoil what happens next, mostly because it’s too incoherent to reconstruct. Suffice it to say that Ratner’s film follows that famous adage that a Ferrari introduced in the first act will be dangled at length from a top-floor window in the third. It felt as if that one agonizing set piece took up a full fifth of the film’s running time, but maybe that was just an illusion brought on by extreme boredom. Either way, surely a true defender of the working class would attempt to fill our meager hour and half’s worth of weekly leisure time with something more than a slow-motion paean to the monstrous and expensive logistics of his movie’s central stunt.
Eddie Murphy is here, though, which should alone spell redemption for “Tower Heist” — he is the funniest man to have done nothing funny in going on two decades. Yet his role is simply offensive: Slide is the latest iteration of a bad joke that has already turned up this year in films like “Horrible Bosses,” in which an inept petty thief with a passing familiarity with the way regular humans talk to each other on the street is mistaken for a master criminal by a bunch of bumbling envoys from the bourgeoisie. He will show them how to rob; in turn, they will inadvertently lead him to a bigger score than he could ever manage on his own. But noblesse oblige is never funny, even between criminals.
Murphy gets only one scene here — impersonating a bank officer — in which he is able to recapture the charismatic con man of his “Beverly Hills Cop” years. Otherwise he’s as much as a caricature as Alda’s puddle of good ol’ boy malevolence. Surprisingly, it’s Leoni, a veteran of more successful ’90s spectacles like “Bad Boys” and “Deep Impact,” who gets the script’s best jokes: As an FBI agent from an adjacent Queens neighborhood, she drinks Stiller under the table, then gives him the surveillance video of his assault on Shaw’s Ferrari as a token of her esteem.
Reportedly, and perhaps this is unfair to bring up, Murphy originally conceived “Tower Heist” as an African-American response to the “Ocean’s Eleven” series. This is an idea so rich with possibility that only Hollywood and an army of screenwriters — some credited, most not — could turn it into a Brett Ratner film starring Ben Stiller, Matthew Broderick and one black lead (Gabourey Sidibe has a supporting role as a sexually voracious Jamaican maid). Ultimately, “Tower Heist” is buffed of any politics at all, racial or otherwise; the only question is who will be the most successful thief by the end. The money remains everything.
The Daily: 1 of 5 Stars
Rotten Tomatoes: 60%
More on 'Tower Heist'
IMDB | Official Website
On some basic level, the critic’s job is simple: Ascertain, as best you can, the artist’s intentions. Judge the work according to how successfully those intentions were realized. Scribble conclusions. Repeat until senescence.
But what do you do in the case of Brett Ratner, the only director currently working in Hollywood who can be said to have absolutely no intentions at all? For practical reasons, this shouldn’t even be possible — the modern film production requires so many gaffers and extras and European investor dollars, so many top-line stars with top-line constraints on their time, so many people working more or less 24 hours a day for periods of up to two or three years, that there must, you would think, be a reason, some kind of idea that everyone can point to as the pretext for staging the multimillion-dollar enterprise in the first place.
But if there is any recognizable thought or goal or vision behind Ratner’s newest, “Tower Heist,” it did not manifest itself at the screening I attended. The vague topicality of the film — a Ponzi schemer by the name of Arthur Shaw (Alan Alda), who happens to have been born in Queens like Bernie Madoff, makes off with the pensions of the staff of his lavish building, who then decide to rob him in order to get their money back — only highlights this fact. Shaw could be the Sheriff of Nottingham or the smoke monster from “Lost,” for all that the specifics of his villainy matter.
Facing off against Shaw in a literal game of chess (because “Checkmate!” is the most valuable of screenwriter koans, I guess) is Ben Stiller’s Josh Kovacs, who listens to radio programs on wine and cheese pairings in the mornings and who, as manager of the building, cleverly loses at board games to the wealthiest of the structure’s wealthy tenants. Kovacs — who inexplicably maintains a dingy apartment in the blue-collar Astoria neighborhood despite his job running what we are told is the “most expensive real estate in North America” — is the benevolent Main Street to Shaw’s Wall Street, and when revelations of Shaw’s theft surface, Kovacs wastes no time in pummeling Shaw’s vintage Ferrari with a blunt instrument. Take that, 1 percent!
For this offense, he is promptly exiled from the building, along with his accomplices, Casey Affleck’s Charlie, a concierge, and Michael Peña’s Dev’reaux, an elevator operator. Despondent and broke, Kovacs rallies his gang — which comes to include Chase Fitzhugh (Matthew Broderick), a Yale graduate and former building resident whose apartment is foreclosed upon, and Slide (Eddie Murphy), an old neighborhood acquaintance and small-time criminal — to raid Shaw’s penthouse, inside which, a friendly FBI agent (Téa Leoni) has informed Kovacs, should be stashed some significant cash portion of Shaw’s ill-gotten gains.
We won’t spoil what happens next, mostly because it’s too incoherent to reconstruct. Suffice it to say that Ratner’s film follows that famous adage that a Ferrari introduced in the first act will be dangled at length from a top-floor window in the third. It felt as if that one agonizing set piece took up a full fifth of the film’s running time, but maybe that was just an illusion brought on by extreme boredom. Either way, surely a true defender of the working class would attempt to fill our meager hour and half’s worth of weekly leisure time with something more than a slow-motion paean to the monstrous and expensive logistics of his movie’s central stunt.
Eddie Murphy is here, though, which should alone spell redemption for “Tower Heist” — he is the funniest man to have done nothing funny in going on two decades. Yet his role is simply offensive: Slide is the latest iteration of a bad joke that has already turned up this year in films like “Horrible Bosses,” in which an inept petty thief with a passing familiarity with the way regular humans talk to each other on the street is mistaken for a master criminal by a bunch of bumbling envoys from the bourgeoisie. He will show them how to rob; in turn, they will inadvertently lead him to a bigger score than he could ever manage on his own. But noblesse oblige is never funny, even between criminals.
Murphy gets only one scene here — impersonating a bank officer — in which he is able to recapture the charismatic con man of his “Beverly Hills Cop” years. Otherwise he’s as much as a caricature as Alda’s puddle of good ol’ boy malevolence. Surprisingly, it’s Leoni, a veteran of more successful ’90s spectacles like “Bad Boys” and “Deep Impact,” who gets the script’s best jokes: As an FBI agent from an adjacent Queens neighborhood, she drinks Stiller under the table, then gives him the surveillance video of his assault on Shaw’s Ferrari as a token of her esteem.
Reportedly, and perhaps this is unfair to bring up, Murphy originally conceived “Tower Heist” as an African-American response to the “Ocean’s Eleven” series. This is an idea so rich with possibility that only Hollywood and an army of screenwriters — some credited, most not — could turn it into a Brett Ratner film starring Ben Stiller, Matthew Broderick and one black lead (Gabourey Sidibe has a supporting role as a sexually voracious Jamaican maid). Ultimately, “Tower Heist” is buffed of any politics at all, racial or otherwise; the only question is who will be the most successful thief by the end. The money remains everything.
