Tower Heist (2011)
Directed by Brett Ratner
A luxury condo manager leads a staff of workers to seek payback on the Wall Street swindler who defrauded them. With only days until the billionaire gets away with the perfect crime, the unlikely crew of amateur thieves enlists the help of petty crook Slide to steal the $20 million they’re sure is hidden in the penthouse.
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4 films that influenced Tower Heist
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Best of all, he somehow manages to get a ferocious, energetic performance from Eddie Murphy, who is at his fast-talking best, recalling his star-making turns in 48 Hrs. and Trading Places .
That performer, of course, is Eddie Murphy who segued from "Saturday Night Live" cast member to Hollywood superstar with "Beverly Hills Cop," "Trading Places" and "48 Hours."
He's been portraying the sharp-tongued hustler since "48 Hours" and "Trading Places" in the early 1980s.
Beginning with “48 Hours” and then following up with such popular films as “Trading Places,” “Beverly Hills Cop” and “Coming to America,” Murphy was the standard that all other comedians were compared to.
Murphy essentially plays a 25-years-older version of his character from Trading Places, another comedy about revenge against evil rich villains which had a much more witty and creative third act than does Tower Heist.
A sequence where he tasks the amateurs each to steal $50 worth of merchandise at a mall is particularly funny, but really, it's just a pleasure to see the Eddie Murphy of Trading Places and Beverly Hills Cop again.
It's no surprise that the writer of 2001's "Ocean's Eleven," Ted Griffin, was involved as the film has the same basic template without the loose camaraderie of that film's cast.
The buzz: It’s not quite the all-star line-up of “Ocean’s Eleven,” but director Brett Ratner’s heist-driven action-comedy does feature a theoretically major comic pairing in Stiller and Murphy.
Initially conceived as an "urban" Ocean's Eleven (from which only Eddie Murphy remains), this genially absurd, gently cathartic, and slightly stale Brett Ratner caper is now about the employees of America's most expensive apartment building (played by the haphazardly disguised Trump International Hotel & Tower on Central Park West), who plot to take back what was rightfully theirs when the billionaire in the penthouse (Alan Alda) embezzled their pension fund.
But the script by Ted Griffin ("Ocean's Eleven") and Jeff Nathanson ("Catch Me If You Can") doesn't make the usual action comedy mistake of piling on the action at the expense of the comedy.
Alert to the righteous rage of the 99%-ers and canny about how to mine that rage for laughs, Tower Heist is like Ocean’s Eleven meets class consciousness.
All of this is to say that "Tower Heist" winds up being a poor man's "Ocean's Eleven."
But the script by Ted Griffin ("Ocean's Eleven") and Jeff Nathanson ("Catch Me If You Can") doesn't make the usual action comedy mistake of piling on the action at the expense of the comedy.
Scenes never overstay their welcome; indeed, at film’s end, one half-remembers hints of storylines never returned to, and one wonders if swaths of the script – by Ted Griffin (Ocean's Eleven) and Jeff Nathanson (Catch Me if You Can) – were ruthlessly excised by quality control for not fulfilling one of two directives – to service the action, or to service the comedy.
It helps that the screenplay is from two veteran writers, Ted Griffin ("Ocean's Eleven") and Jeff Nathanson ("Catch Me If You Can") who have been down this road before.
Too bad screenwriters Ted Griffin ("Ocean's Eleven") and Jeff Nathanson (whose credits range from the "Rush Hour" sequels to "Catch Me If You Can") skimp on another vital heist-movie component, glossing over much of the intricate preparation for the outlandish caper itself.
Griffin had written the screenplays of Matchstick Men and Ocean Eleven, while Nathanson had written Speed 2: Cruise Control, Rush Hour 2 & 3, and Catch Me If You Can, so perhaps it makes sense that Tower Heist is consistently entertaining, delightfully hilarious outrageous while never insulting the audience�s intelligence like most American comedies do nowadays with excessive toilet humor.
Considering the combined pedigree of Griffin and Nathanson (who, respectively, penned "Ocean's Eleven" and "Catch Me If You Can"), it shouldn't come as a surprise that they've applied the same sort of crime caper magic to this offering.
Tower Heist also pales in comparison to another film – 2006's overlooked and underrated Smokin' Aces , in which numerous rival groups of hitmen fight with each other to break into a penthouse suite to kill mob snitch Jeremy Piven.