Just to let you know where I'm coming from: As usual I avoided reading anything about the movie before seeing it. A film is ALWAYS better if it's like a book by an unknown author that you picked up off a bookstall as you were heading to the airport. Seriously, why do film companies essentially blurt out a film story's secrets that will take any surprises out of the first hour of a film? Maybe this is why I enjoyed the first half so much compared to other reviewers. It's a good yarn that is not as obvious as some would have you believe. Ben Stiller doesn't go too far from his safety zone playing Josh Kovacs, a reliable, serious, not-exactly-happy-but-putting-up-with-it manager of a ritzy apartment block. You like him. He's decent, loyal and almost a slave to the wealthy, privileged tenants who hold a great sense of entitlement to the things the majority of us don't have. Here's the subtext. He's like most of us today who live in a society that is convinced those less well off should get the "trickles" that come down from government payouts to our betters (BTW, didn't anybody in power look up the word "trickle" before okaying this?). And Stiller does it very well. He's getting older and greyer. He's fit and precise but a shade weary, repressed by a life of looking after the wishes and feelings of others and foregoing his own. (Probably coincidence but an almost interesting one: Kovacs backwards is Scavok. Sciavo in Italian is 'slave'). Alan Alda is the initially affable Arthur Shaw, a big guy on Wall Street. You like him too. He's friendly, avuncular and a man of the people. Director Brett Ratner gives us a sharp and snappy whirl through the characters and milieu with Dante Spinotti's strong and glossy cinematography hitting all the right notes. There's a great support cast of workers of an ethnic rainbow who we already like from their film histories that include Michael Peňa and Gabourey Sidibe, rising sufficiently above their paper stereotypes to just about forgive the cynical choices in creating them. Matthew Broderick is overly convincing as a crushed and ruined investment banker, a personality that exhausts your patience but must have seemed a good idea at the time. Casey Afflek shows a great talent for comedy timing as Josh's unreliable brother in law and Eddie Murphy steals scenes by his observations on "Lesbian titties" or by simply smiling. The romantic interest is FBI agent Tea Leoni, who is invariably wonderful in anything and doesn't fail here, giving depth to words that are sometimes as thin as the ink they were written in. She's not a twenty-something anymore and the camera irritatingly avoids real close ups. Ah well. That voice. I'd be happy just to listen to her but would have preferred if they didn't worry so about showing the forty-ish female lead as anything less than airbrushed. Like Eddy Murphy she ultimately seems grossly underused. I'm not giving much away in an IMDb review to say that Alda's Shaw turns out to be a Bernie Maddoff character callously looking to get away with ripping off thousands of investors and cheating justice as well. The pensions and savings of tower staff look to be lost and when Josh sees first hand Shaw's indifference to the plight of his fellow workers he gathers a team of unlikely robbers to regain the usual 'hidden stash' in the penthouse apartment. So we come to the big flaw of a film that needed one last rewrite: the director and the script writers get us to the top of the building, but they don't know how to get us down safely. They are altogether deft and efficient up to this point but run scared when presented with the job of bringing all the threads of action and personality to their just ends. We get resolution without closure. I understand there are other versions of the ending. As is now becoming familiar perhaps the DVD will be the finished product, where we are allowed to have several alternatives mingle into a whole and satisfy us beyond the clean-cut simplicity of the screen version. (nb. There is yet another reference to a chess game between villain and hero that like dozens of others in recent times sounds like the writers' knowledge comes from a single Wikipedia article. Enough with the chess motif!)
Review of Tower Heist
