‘Tower Heist’ film review: Not all heist movies are fun
One of the thoughts that I had while watching Tower Heist(2011) was a question: “What’s a talented actor like Mathew Broderick doing in a film like this?” The thing with Broderick is he has the rare ability to raise even a mediocre role into something extremely watchable.
But not so in this one, and that’s no fault of the actor either.
The movie, ostensibly, is about a heist on a tower. A skyscraper that belongs to a Wall Street millionaire played with charming sneakiness by Alan Alda. When it turns out that he has swindled his employees out of their pension money, a ragtag team of his employees, led by his building manager(Ben Stiller) and including a con(Eddie Murphy) decides to steal from his locker on the top floor.
Brett Ratner directed this film. I have enjoyed the director’s many films including “Rush hour’ and ‘Red dragon.’ His IMDB entry rightly claims him as one of the most successful Hollywood film directors.
However, his efforts don’t look all that successful here as the film comes across more as a hopscotch of disparate ideas than completely cohesive.
To be fair, it’s more the problem of the script than the director that things are so lamentable in this comedy-thriller which is neither as funny as it should be nor as thrilling as it could have been.
The credits list eight different writers as having worked on the script. One couldn’t help but wonder if it’s a case of too many cooks being employed by the studio.
There are impeccably directed scenes- like the one in which Stiller’s Manager detects the faint buzzing of a phone amidst clamor- a phone that belongs to Michael Pena’s liftboy. And the set up of having the heist while a thanksgiving parade takes place on the street outside the building is interesting.
But such elements couldn’t possibly lift the script which obviously needed another round or two of tweaks. The silver lining is Stiller himself, who portrays the lead man with a flamboyance that you don’t get to see in all of the actors’ films.
Tea Leoni is another talented actor who somehow got caught up in this mess. She plays the FBI agent in charge of the case of the millionaire swindling his employees.
But she is given too little screen time to do anything substantial, and the romantic angle between her and Stiller’s character looks childishly under-developed.
It’s not so much a case of one-dimensionality in characterization as it about presenting vaccum as the intellectual underpinning of clearly intelligent characters. Put another way, it’s lazy writing.
The film’s big twist comes towards the end when it’s revealed that the money that the robbers expect is not inside the safe as they had thought. But you would have already guessed a peculiar object in that hall which has been highlighted before would be where the money is.
Like with the rest of the film, things appear cleverer than they are.
