Tower Heist

Rush Hour was a successful film of its time that spawned its own series and gave a lot of mainstream attention to the two leading men; Jackie Chan and Chris Tucker, while providing a pretty mindless and slightly offensive, but otherwise simple fluffy action comedy. It was also the biggest career success for director, Brett Ratner, whose filmography is quite sparse and filled with options that don’t feel like good matches for his style (like Red Dragon, X-Men: The Last Stand and Hercules). While his slumped career makes sense given the sexual allegations placed against him, his return to direct Rush Hour 4 shows that it’s the franchise that’s kept him alive as a filmmaker, and he made one other movie that felt like it was trying to recapture the magic in 2011, that being the heist comedy, Tower Heist.

Josh Kovaks (played by Ben Stiller) is the building manager for The Tower, an upscale apartment complex in New York City that has Wall Street billionaire Arthur Shaw (played by Alan Alda) as its penthouse tenant. While Josh is extremely effective at his job and has a good repartee with all the employees and even with Shaw himself, the security of his life is thrown into chaos when Shaw is placed under house arrest for masterminding a Ponzi scheme, with the employees losing all of their pension after investing in him (which Kovaks suggested them to do). Feeling defeated and getting fired from his job after taking his rage out on Shaw who will be able to avoid prison time through connections, Kovaks orchestrates a plan to steal $20 million dollars from within a hidden safe in Shaw’s apartment, getting the help of former employees and residents of the Tower, including investor and evicted tenant,  Mr. Fitzhugh (played by Matthew Broderick), elevator operator, Enrique Dev’reaux (played by Michael Peña), concierge and Josh’s brother-in-law, Charlie (played by Casey Affleck), and a Jamaican maid named Odessa (played by Gabourey Sidibe). After adding petty crook, Darnell ‘Slide’ David (played by Eddie Murphy) to the mix to learn the tricks of thievery, this motley crew will need to bypass some of the highest security in New York to enter Shaw’s apartment and retrieve the money that was stolen from them.

Despite being positioned as Ocean’s Eleven meets Rush Hour, Tower Heist is neither of those films, and its poor critical reception and failure at the box office proves it. While it gets off to a decent start, and there’s potential to be had with this premise and some of these actors, the bland storytelling, boring/annoying/generic characters with wonky performances, a tone of humor that ranges from numbing to derogatory, and a heist that somehow makes the film worse instead of better, makes this a scheme that was better left on the drawing board.

The initial idea started with Eddie Murphy himself rather than Ratner, with him pitching a concept in 2005 centred around him and a bunch of other black comedians like Martin Lawrence, Chris Tucker, Kevin Hart, Dave Chappelle and Tracy Morgan as a bunch of disgruntled employees who try to rob Donald Trump and his Tower. While Murphy would leave the project after the script would go through five years of rewrites, he would eventually return after Ratner retooled the picture into more of heist flick reminiscent of features like The Taking of Pelham One, Two Three, The Hot Rock, The Anderson Tapes, and the Ocean’s films (which makes sense given one of the film’s screenwriters, Ted Griffin, worked on the 2001 Ocean’s remake). Heist films can be pretty fun, and while Ratner’s style can be a little childish and not the most PC, there is a world where this combination could work and the first act almost fools people into thinking things will go smoothly. While the writing by Griffin and Jeff Nathanson isn’t that humorous and the plot (written by Griffin, Bill Collage and Adam Cooper) is a fairly standard ‘’taking back from a corrupt boss’’ scenario, the energy, pacing and personality that comes from the actors and location are enough to keep you invested and genuinely want to see how things are going to turn out.

Things ironically fall downhill when they start planning the heist itself, as things either come too easily to the characters, or their preparation is so bogged-standard or without much thought that you can’t enjoy watching the spider-web get untangled. While it has a hint of what’s required to be an effective replication of the genre, the people involved clearly don’t have the effective know-how to create a really gripping heist picture, and since the tone is annoyingly kiddish, it isn’t even allowed to have a bit of an edge or grit which would’ve at least offered something more grounded. The directing is overly perky without engaging material to work with, with shades of derogatory, racist and homophobic content scattered throughout (big shock given who’s leading the ship), the plot never goes in any interesting directions and by the end, just feels very silly and childish, the characters of focus are pretty bland and the performances aren’t good enough to make up for the lack of chemistry or effective dialogue, and while it isn’t suffocated by being stuck in the 2010s, it’s a personality that limits freshness and a unique identity, so it isn’t really able to stand out from other silly comedies that were released around the same time.

While this film has a stacked cast and a lot of them were notable names of the time that could’ve worked well in this premise, it doesn’t feel like any of them are allowed to be that interesting or even go all the way with their comedy, being stuck with very bland material from a comedic and dramatic angle. While the pairing of Ben Stiller and Eddie Murphy is clearly calling back to Jackie Chan and Chris Tucker’s pairing (with Murphy himself even trying to emulate Tucker in parts through the overly fast dialogue, and hyperactive manic energy), it doesn’t even come close to mirroring what Chan and Tucker were able to accomplish, largely because they barely have time to interact. Both Stiller and Murphy can be a little one-note with their humor, but can be funny when given good material, so they are struggling to survive with these barely stitched together parts, and their banter is very uninteresting and never lets either of them shine together or individually. The rest of the main crew are also incredibly uninteresting, making sure that we are never surrounded by captivating characters for the entire running time. Michael Peña just feels like a one-note trope, Casey Affleck is very random and awkward without any good moments to mention, Matthew Broderick and Téa Leoni are truly terrible in this (with Leoni playing a particularly dumb F.B.I agent who serves very little purpose), Alan Alda is such an obvious one-note corporate villain that he’s never fun to watch when on-screen, and Gabourey Sidibe and Stephen McKinley Henderson are way too good for such poorly written characters and material, it’s just insulting to see them wasted so heavily.

Ironically the secondary roles within The Tower itself are actually far more interesting and likeable to watch than any of the main characters, largely because the actors have more personality behind their bit parts and the vibe of the hotel feels very authentic. The filmmakers and writers did speak with residential managers of several high-profile complexes, and you can feel it through how the staff and the clientele are performed, which can feel stereotypical in some parts, but still illicit a lot of character. This isn’t the case for everyone, as Judd Hirsch is a very one note role, but people like Nina Arianda, Marcia Jean Kurtz, Juan Carlos Hernández, Clem Cheung, Marilyn Kim and Johnny Tran are believable enough to truly bring this hotel environment to life and arguably do a better job than the leads.

While films focused around the 1% are tiring to witness nowadays (even those that focus on tearing them down as we all sympathize yet are tired of hearing the same thing over and over again), the notion of seeing a heist take place within a high-rise apartment complex could be pretty interesting, and the narrow window of entry and exit mixed with the unique obstacles and multiple stages to cross given the various floors could allow it to still be a great location to set a heist in. While the heist in question is pretty uninteresting and doesn’t really use the space that well (if anything, the final plans makes these characters look unbelievably stupid), The Tower is a great location to film in, with its ornate design mixed with strong popping coloration (which could be said for the rest of the movie as well) keeping things visually appealing and dynamic. With Trump himself actually allowing the use of several of his towers in this film, there’s no shortage for classy apparel and giant-feeling spaces, and while the movie does have a dated feel to it through the cinematography by Dante Spinotti, the production design by Kristi Zea, and even the musical score by Christophe Beck, it doesn’t make these components bad. The shots are fairly standard looking, but can occasionally offer a nice shot, the production does look lavish and colorful without going too far, and the score does feel a little repetitive and boring after a while but has enough of an upbeat energy and specific choices of instruments to feel like a heist soundtrack (just more for a casual audience).

Tower Heist could’ve been something with the right handling and material, but if it still wasn’t able to get pieced together after nearly six years in the oven, maybe it just wasn’t worth trying to bake. The film has a decent opening and conveys its titular location in a way that offers some playfully exaggerated caricatures of this kind of high-rise environment, but with really unlikeable leads, mismatched direction, and comedy that only tries to get a laugh at the expense of Koreans and Lesbians (big shock that a sexual predator and his equally-as-gropy billionaire buddy created a film that loves to insult minorities), it’s a mission that doesn’t feel worth the effort.