Tower Heist brings back the bad old days of High Concept. That was the ’80s practice when movie marketing first began to replace storytelling—starting with unoriginal and uninformative titles that labeled movies like generic product on supermarket shelves: Flashdance, Top Gun, Fatal Attraction, 48 Hrs. And similarly, Tower Heist lowers audience expectations at the same time it coarsens taste.
Ben Stiller plays Josh Kovacs, general manager of a luxury midtown Manhattan co-op, who leads a pack of disgruntled workers to rob the Trump-Madoff type owner (Alan Arkin) who steals their pensions. In a real movie, Kovacs’ characterization would have revealed how worker resentment comes from aggrieved trust; high concept settles for caper plotting among the motley crew, throwing in Eddie Murphy as Slide, Kovacs’ neighborhood thug, for comic relief.
Murphy is the original high concept star whose chameleon comic gifts were launched in slick empty ’80s vehicles, but none as shallow as this. Ironically, Murphy’s artistry has developed and he gives Tower Heist a powerful quicksilver presence. His sharp, angry aggression realistically captures left-behind class resentment (while recalling the career shift of Vampire in Brooklyn when Murphy first reacted to media backlash). Murphy’s sketchy yet startling Slide (foul-mouthed nemesis from Kovacs’ childhood) goes nowhere because Tower Heist reduces its characters to oafish types.
Tower Heist cheats audience interest in the way modern labor responds to the economics of greed and the class tease of affluence. Its potential improvement on Steven Soderbergh’s hypocritical Oceans heist franchise is lost to crowd-pleasing (slightly insulting) views of a drone-like, corrupt, imbecilic working class. Alda’s arriviste scam (“Deep down I’m just an Astoria boy”) should have exposed the cutthroat economic system that is basic to New York City life. That capitalist truth motivates some of the most startling recent films, from the Coen Brothers’ The Ladykillers to the urban action film Takers—movies that transcended High Concept formula through artistic flair and deep characterizations.
Director Brett Ratner typically brazens past artistry and depth. Tower Heist is just a series of crass situations, stupid logistics involving a red sportscar in a skyscraper and dumb character foibles—except for Michael Pena’s comic genius as the go-getter “Puerto Rican Mohican.” Pena and Murphy might have made a good urban-ethnic duo, but Stiller’s a High Concept blank, as if he can’t shake the gloom of Greenberg. The remaining heist crew Gabourey Sidibe, Matthew Broderick and Casey Affleck are expectedly embarrassing—especially the joke that introduces Sidibe as “the elephant in the room.” Ratner photographs her cruelly and without care; the same High Concept cynicism he shows to the mass audience.
