Stealing back from The Man in Tower Heist

Josh Kovacs (Ben Stiller) is a man betrayed. He’s been working hard as the building manager of The Tower Building for 11 years, but it turns out his boss has been playing hooky with the staff’s retirement money. The very definition of upscale, The Tower has state-of-the-art security, great views and a staff that, in the words of Kovacs, “gives you their undivided attention 24 hours a day." As luxurious condominiums go, living in Central Park in New York couldn’t be any better. Working as the building manager for more than a decade, Kovacs has formed an ersatz friendship with the proprietor, Arthur Shaw (Alan Alda), a Wall Street consultant whose adventures in the finance world have become legendary and made him extremely wealthy. Kovacs and Shaw play online chess regularly and, because they’ve been working together for more than a decade, Kovacs entrusted the retirement fund of many of his co-workers into Shaw’s care. That is, until the FBI come knocking on the swank doors of the Tower to arrest Shaw. It turns out he’s been caught stealing $2 billion from his investors. And all the staffers whose pensions he was entrusted to manage? Gone. All gone. Directed by Hollywood darling Brett Ratner (Red Dragon, the Rush Hour series), this movie is about the plight of the working class who, literally, rise up to stick it to The Man. It’s like Ocean’s Eleven without the acrobatics or suave sex appeal. The only slickness you’ll see in The Tower Heist is from the evil, rich dude who truly couldn’t care less about the little guys, despite his exhortations to the contrary. A stellar ensemble cast that includes late '80s and '90s stars Tea Leoni, Matthew Broderick and Eddie Murphy (who plays Slide, a rude and crass petty thief who’s also the only actual criminal in the group of first time lawbreakers) is combined with the new talents of Casey Affleck, Gabourey Sidibe and Michael Pena, and what we have here is a comedy caper with a heady dose of current events reality. Perhaps too much reality, in fact. There are several very gut-wrenching, almost viscerally empathic scenes in the movie that drive home how much America has suffered from the economic depression. There’s the one where Kovacs gathers the Tower’s staff and tells them their pension went down with the boss; the one where Mr. Fitzhugh (Broderick), a former Wall Street investor who’s just been made bankrupt, needs to vacate his apartment because everything’s been repossessed and he confesses he’s living out of cardboard boxes; and the one where the Tower’s elderly doorman Lester (Stephen Henderson), who’s up for retirement in a few months, decides to step in front of a subway train. As Lester lies in the hospital and talks to Kovacs about his life as a doorman, he punctuates it with the hindsight that, “Truth is, people can open their own doors." Pretty heavy stuff for a comedy caper, but Ratner mines the ensuing sympathy for all it’s worth as motivation for Kovacs and crew to engineer the heist. Talk about payoff. With only days before Shaw gets away with the perfect crime, Kovacs forms his ragtag crew and hatches a plan to steal back their money, which they are sure is hidden in their former boss’s penthouse condo. Though total rookies in the thieving game, they do know the building better than anyone and the proceedings of the heist are a mix of suspense, bumbling action, and comedy that’s a mix of sharp satire and Eddie Murphy’s over the top “angry black man meets cruel world" routine. The ensuing improvisation on the plan is like watching blind mice feel around for a light switch. It’s as much Murphy’s return to form as anything else too, especially when the group turns to his character for the basics of criminality. At a mall, Slide tells each of the former salary men to leave their wallets, steal something worth $150 and bring it back to him. Slide, of course, promptly divests their wallets of money even as he teaches them the confidence it takes to commit a theft. An awesome scene of schadenfreude is when Kovacs, learning that the boss he trusted has swindled their money, breaks down at the penthouse and starts smashing Shaw’s vintage Steve McQueen’s Ferrari with a golf club. The operative word there is “club" and that is, by far, my favorite sequence in this movie. With nary an explosion, Tower Heist is like the rush of a zipline traversing from one skyscraper to another. See it if you like your comedy with a rush of illegal adventurism. - YA, GMA News Tower Heist opened November 4, 2011 at all Metro Manila theaters. Photos courtesy of Universal Pictures and UIP