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Tower Heist: The Big Payback
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Ho, Ho, Ho, just in time for the holidays, now that Halloween is over and the Great Pumpkin has passed Linus by until next year, comes the amusing caper comedy “Tower Heist” about a gang of economic outcasts plotting a felonious act in the name of a common good, vengeance.
Ben Stiller stars as Josh Kovacs, the dedicated building manager of The Tower, a luxurious Manhattan high rise whose richest resident Arthur Shaw, played by Alan Alda with equal parts old neighborhood warmth and privileged smugness, has bilked. At Josh’s well intentioned behest, the building’s staff out of their life’s savings in an investment scam so vast that up until recently one would think it could never happen.
When Josh’s display of outrage at Shaw’s betrayal of trust leads to his and several staff members’ dismissal, they band together with Mr. Fitzhugh, well played by Matthew Broderick as a nervous breakdown ready ex-Wall Streeter, on the verge of eviction from the Tower. United they form a kind of Robin Hood and his merry doormen and scheme to break into Shaw’s apartment to make off with S20-million they believe he has stashed there. After all, it’s barely stealing if the loot was sort of yours to begin with and hey that kind of dough can certainly tide one over between unemployment checks (note the FBI may disagree).
Alas, Josh soon realizes the kink in their plan is they have no criminal experience having spent their lives as servers rather than takers. Enter Eddie Murphy as “Slide” Josh’s recently “wrongly incarcerated” neighbor and career petty thief who Josh recruits to lend his light fingered expertise to the gang’s penthouse treasure hunt. Murphy is at his best doing the street-hustler-screwing-with-the-white-boys schtick he honed to razor sharpness in “48-Hours”, “Trading Places” and the “Beverly Hills Cop” pictures of the 1980s. It’s refreshing to see Murphy can still whip out his inner Axel Foley, only now with an extra toughness that makes his scenes the most interesting as both crime drama and Keystone comedy.
Without giving too much away, suffice it to say “Tower Heist” won’t be stealing any Academy Awards come spring, but audiences, those that can still afford to go to the movies anyway, will leave with renewed hope that in these economically trying times, every once in a while. The bigger and higher up the bastards are, the more fun it is to watch ‘em fall.
And this year, that’s what Christmas is all about Charlie Brown.