Ben Stiller and Eddie Murphy have both logged plenty of time in uninspired franchises and family films, sometimes choosing roles more like careful old rich guys than hungry, restless comics -- especially Murphy, who has taken a long, dispiriting vacation from even trying to be funny. In Tower Heist, they attempt to shrug off some of that complacency and go working class. Stiller, with a slight Queens accent, plays Josh Kovacs, a building manager at The Tower, basically an un-branded Trump Tower in midtown Manhattan. Murphy is Slide, another Queens native; they were in neighborhood daycare together as kids, but their relationship has failed to develop beyond Slide yelling at Josh on the street on a semi-regular basis.
Josh runs a tight ship -- he's a typical uptight Stiller character minus the urban neuroses and plus some an old-fashioned work ethic -- and does particular favors for Arthur Shaw (Alan Alda), the condescending financial wizard in the penthouse of the Tower, who likes to pretend to be just plain folks (he's yet another guy from Astoria). When Shaw is implicated in a massive financial scam, Josh and the rest of the Tower workers find that the potential losses include their pensions, which Shaw agreed to manage. Like so many since 2008, they see their retirement funds collapse before their eyes.
To protect his people, Josh recruits his concierge (Casey Affleck), the new elevator operator (Michael Pena), a maid (Gabourey Sidibe), an evicted tenant (Matthew Broderick), and finally Slide for an unlikely revenge heist: busting into Shaw's apartment and stealing his alleged $20 million safety net, which the FBI (led by Tea Leoni, with welcome charm) has been unable to locate. Rather than the usual mounting pressures on the robbery, director Brett Ratner and his screenwriters, including heist-movie vet Ted Griffin and Spielberg go-to Jeff Nathanson, focus more on stacking the deck, making sure Shaw is despicable enough to warrant ripping off.
The extensive justification isn't necessary. From a zeitgeist point of view, the job is a slam-dunk: taking back money from a Bernie Madoff-ish scammer, remade by Alda with a banker's smug facade. Logistically, though, it makes less sense: it never occurs to the FBI to search his apartment for a wall safe? It never occurs to Shaw to hide his millions elsewhere, or at least spread them out?
Logistics, as it turns out, are not Brett Ratner's strong suit. The trickiest job for a heist movie, crucial to generating suspense, is figuring out the delicate balance between explaining what is supposed to happen during the robbery and dramatizing what actually happens. Ratner does little of either; when Slide deviates from the plan at a crucial moment, the movie never stops to explain what the original plan was, especially strange because Slide's gambit makes far more sense than any clear alternate.
The entire heist sequence moves that way: skipped steps, unclear geography, shifting allegiances that ultimately mean nothing, all dressed up in nonsensical chess metaphors; it's as if the filmmakers started with one big reveal (an admittedly neat one, when it happens), and then failed to work backwards. In short, it's another slack Ratner caper in the mode of After the Sunset.
This is a better movie than Sunset, though, an agreeable time-waster with some funny moments. Many of those are provided by Murphy, giving his most fully alive and consistently delightful performance in years. He's not given much of a character; the screenplay never bothers to figure out whether Slide is a ruthless expert thief or a low-rent con artist (Murphy has more fun hinting at the latter). But Murphy still spins out some trademark riffs and face-saving line deliveries. He once specialized in playing brash, fast-talking wiseasses, but as he's aged, at least at his sporadic post-eighties best, he channels that energy into characters with deranged enthusiasm and eccentricities. Though ill-defined by the script, Slide is of a piece with Kit Ramsey of Bowfinger or Kelly Robinson of I Spy, a slick hustler not quite grown up.
Unfortunately, Murphy has far less screentime in Tower Heist. In the end, he's assigned no more importance than anyone else in the ensemble, save Stiller. This is a supporting performance, not half of a comic duo (strange, because Murphy has a producer credit, and is said to have brought the project to Ratner years ago). That ensemble does boast an easy chemistry. Broderick, Pena, and Sidibe all get their share of laughs, while Stiller plays mostly straight -- probably straighter than necessary, but anchoring the silliness. The film's funniest moments come whenever the team puts their heads together to prepare for the robbery, only to get sidetracked by their lack of all-business finesse. Stiller's presentation on building personnel, for example, leads his crew to mistakenly conclude that the robbery will basically involve running "a gauntlet of lesbians."
At these moments, Tower Heist feels like it's gearing up for a lot of fun; instead, it's enjoyable in a lazy, moderate sort of way. Ratner fails to capitalize on the comic tension between working stiffs and a career criminal, cutting away before the funniest scenes really amount to anything (or before the audience has a clear idea of how the heist will work). The robbery itself feels refreshingly low-tech, relying on Josh's inside-out (and very New Yorky) knowledge of the high rise, but the movie's interest in this aspect seems cursory. Ratner has become a master at assembling good actors, good ideas, and strong technical hands, while fudging the specific details that might make his work stand out. He wants desperately to please a crowd yet has no real sense of technique; he knows that audiences like Eddie Murphy and Ben Stiller, but doesn't give much thought to why. Like so many of his films, Tower Heist comes out of the gate with confidence and promise, but only just barely gets the job done.
