Tower Heist – THE 2011 Heist Movie0

Written by Adrian Lim

This a movie that feels like Ocean’s 11 but is not quite up to the styl­ized ver­sion of the film.

Here, Alan Alda (MASH) is at his creep­ily dis­lik­able best as a rich Wall Street fig­ure whose lowli­est employ­ees seek revenge after he has swin­dled them out of their pen­sions and life sav­ings. He is of course Bernie Maddoff who took away mil­lions from investors.

The movie takes half an hour to get going, show­ing us the work­ings of the rich in a rich town in a rich build­ing. So when Alan Alda gets arrested and is found to have swin­dled money from the work­ers in the build­ing, Stiller decides on a heist of the fraudster’s hid­den cash which coin­cides with Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade in New York. It should have been fun but its rather less fun than it might have been due to some poor timing.

At parts it suf­fers from imag­i­na­tion and script. Some plot points you can see a mile away (damn you film school) but most impor­tantly, this film should have gone through the roof with a stel­lar cast of Alan Alda, Ben Stiller, Eddie Murphy, Mathew Broderick (Ferris Bueller’s day off), Judd Hirsch (Taxi)  and Casey Affleck. Tea Leoni makes a small cameo as an FBI agent (irony, her for­mer hus­band David Duchovny was from x-files)

The crime’s mas­ter­mind, Ben Stiller, is much fun­nier than the pro­fes­sional crook (Eddie Murphy) he hires to assist, which is strange and the writ­ing for Eddie’s jokes were …emm…FLAT.

Brett Ratner who directed this must have been frus­trated at the out­come that his anti-gay burst recently cost him and Eddie Murphy the oscar’s gig. So much for the guy who brought us the more enter­tain­ing RUSH HOUR and oh…Chris Tucker is more funny than Eddie Murphy.

Maybe he should have been in this film too.