11/13/2023 0 Comments Tower heist reviews![]() ![]() (One of the five credited writers contributed to Ocean’s 11, but this is no Ocean’s 11.) ![]() The movie overpromises with a running chess metaphor, suggesting elaborate complications and elegant payoffs, but what Tower Heist delivers is more like a game of checkers that takes forever to set up and never gets very interesting. If only it were funnier, its various issues might go down easier. Tower Heist is certainly a fantasy, with one dumb conceit after another. During the operation, a guard is knocked unconscious, and one of the conspirators jeopardizes countless lives by driving a vehicle straight into a parade.Ĭomedic fantasy can sometimes get away with treating morally problematic situations with a wink. To prove their seriousness, Slide makes the conspirators steal $50 worth of merchandise apiece in a shopping mall. Along the way, though, the conspiracy crosses a number of moral lines. Is it stealing if it’s already stolen? Well, no, and if civil authorities can’t recover the stolen property, there’s a case to be made that the Tower Heist operation is basically morally legitimate. The arrest indicates he may be an actual criminal of some kind it doesn’t suggest that he’s a successful one. Why Josh thinks Slide is some kind of criminal mastermind is unclear, since the only items on Slide’s résumé we’ve seen are a) randomly cursing at Josh for being on the wrong side of the street in a suit, b) fighting with his girlfriend and c) getting arrested. When it turns out that Shaw has taken the entire staff of The Tower for their retirement packages-and that authorities may not be able to nail Shaw, or to recover millions of dollars he’s hidden somewhere-Josh Kovacs (Ben Stiller), the recently fired general manager of the building, puts together an unlikely conspiracy to break into The Tower and find the missing money.īecause no one involved has any criminal experience, Josh turns to a petty thug named Slide (Eddie Murphy), with whom he has a slight history. Popper’s Penguins, which referenced Trump’s Central Park involvement with Trump Wollman Skating Rink and Tavern on the Green. ![]() The Tower is played by New York’s Trump International, making Tower Heist Hollywood’s latest Donald Trump product placement movie, after Transformers: Dark of the Moon, in which Chicago’s Trump Tower was the Decepticons’ base of operations, and Mr. Tower Heist is the most unassuming of the three, a straightforward vigilante-justice fantasy about the victims of a Bernie Madoff-type con man conspiring to rob their victimizer when it looks like he may get away with his crimes and with at least $20 million in ill-gotten gains.Īrthur Shaw (Alda as yet another charming sleazeball) is living the high life in a penthouse apartment atop a Columbus Circle high rise called The Tower when the FBI catches up with him. A third film, the Wall Street drama Margin Call, dramatizes the 2008 financial meltdown. The line “Is it stealing if it’s already stolen?” crops up twice in In Time, but it could just as easily have been used in Tower Heist. In both of these movies, have-nots set out to redistribute the haves’ illegitimate wealth by robbing them and giving back to their victims. The new caper comedy Tower Heist, starring Ben Stiller, Eddie Murphy, Matthew Broderick, Michael Pena and Gabourey Sidibe as the 99 percent and Alan Alda as the 1 percent, comes on the heels of In Time, a sci-fi action movie starring Justin Timberlake as one of the expendable have-nots and Amanda Seyfried as one of the privileged haves. ![]()
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