Tower Heist (2011)

Brett Ratner is a director who is no stranger to action comedies, being the man who helmed the successful first and third Rush Hour movies. While I wouldn't necessarily say that they were complete successes, they have remained solid pieces of entertainment for their fan base. With Tower Heist, we have a comedy that is more serious than it should be about a crime that is too ridiculous and uninteresting to warrant the dramatic tendencies this movie possesses. There are long moments of our hero being generally angry at the villain and sorrowfully telling his staff, he's the building manager of "The Tower," that their money has been stolen by the villain. That's when he concocts the idea to steal the man's stored-away money, approximately $20,000,000. He enlists the help of a stereotypical black thief, as well as a few members of the staff. They do, in fact, rob the man, in a sequence which involves dangling a red Ferrari high over the Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade. It makes some more sense watching it.

Ben Stiller stars as the man angry enough to smash the windows of a client's prized and priceless automobile. He is his usual self, not really offering anything but his presence. His co-stars include Casey Affleck, Matthew Broderick, and Gobourey Sidibe. Affleck spends most of the film whispering for some reason, Broderick plays the same wimpy character he will now probably play for the rest of his career (Ferris Bueller is nowhere to be found.), and Sidibe is convincing as a Jamaican woman, but it is almost embarrassing for her to be seen wasting her talent in a thankless and very minor role. Alan Alda and Tea Leoni as the corrupt man who thinks he can get away with anything and the FBI agent who falls for Stiller, respectively, also have very little to do in the long run. No, this is a movie about plot in at least one instance where there should have been as very little as possible. This is a comedy for Pete's sake, we don't need scenes of an old man trying to kill himself by jumping in front of a subway, nor the extended use of talking for talking's sake. For a comedy, there are far too many long stretches of humorless fluff. When there is comedy, it's poorly done, as in the scene in which a character holds up a bag with a cockroach in it at a restaurant, saying lunch is on him. The scene ends there, giving up an opportunity for some actual laughs, in favor of the easier throw-away gag, and this happens more than once. There was simply too much emphasis on the intensity of the caper, leaving the audience in the dust a bit.

When Eddie Murphy showed up a third of the way through, I thought surely he would be able to bring some life into a movie that had otherwise been slowly trudging along. Unfortunately, his character suffers from the same fate of the others. He gets a mildly amusing "seizure boy" speech and is then given no other chances to shine comedically. I almost get the impression a lot of footage ended up on the cutting room floor, in order to give more time to the pointless chase scenes and specifics of the robbery. This is a movie with a plot that needed some funny distraction away from its rather absurd story. I do not feel it was a success as a comedy or a thriller, because each relied too heavily on the other, with neither delivering. It isn't a complete failure, though, and it is only the second Thanksgiving movie I'm aware of. That's pretty cool.

5/10