His entire portfolio was a scam and all the money invested with him - including the pension fund of The Tower's workers - is gone. Then the bombshell lands, dropped by FBI Special Agent Claire Denham (Tea Leoni): Shaw has been indicted on multiple counts of fraud. Shaw's every whim is catered to by The Tower's staff, including the concierge, Charlie (Casey Affleck) the elevator operator, Enrique (Michael Pena) the doorman, Lester (Stephen McKinley Henderson) and their boss, Josh (Ben Stiller). Occupying the penthouse with its tremendous view and rooftop swimming pool is multi-millionaire Arthur Shaw (Alan Alda), a crook cast in the mold of Bernie Madoff. The action centers around The Tower, an exclusive high rise Manhattan residence building where apartments start at $5 million. Ratner doesn't care about his characters - he just throws them on screen, mixes them up, and hopes something works. The same can be said of the non-starter romance between Stiller and Tea Leoni. However, with everything else going on, it's impossible for this relationship to get off the ground - the two don't share enough screen time for it to work. With Tower Heist, Ratner attempts to mine a similar buddy film vein with Stiller and Murphy. Ratner's reputation is built primarily on the Rush Hour trilogy, a series that overexposed the limited chemistry between Chris Tucker and Jackie Chan. But the caper is a dud - so stupid and implausible from beginning to end that it's impossible to take it seriously for even the briefest of moments. The pace, emphasized by Christophe Beck's relentless score, is so fast that viewers might miss some of the king-sized plot holes (although not all of them). It is redeemed, at least to a degree, by the comedic performances of lead actor Ben Stiller and supporting player Eddie Murphy. The twists - there are often many but always at least one - are ingenious and the screenplay is often referred to as "smart" and "cunning." Unfortunately, few (if any) of these characteristics apply to Brett Ratner's Tower Heist, as sloppy a heist movie as I can remember. Good heist movies proceed according to an established template that includes meticulous attention to the details of the scheme both in the planning stage and in its execution. Murphy, in his first role since 2009, is in full Eddie Murphy mode, with comic riffs and astonished double takes.Whether suffused with tension or laced with humor, the heist movie has enjoyed enduring appeal since the heyday of film noir. Fitzhugh (Broderick), who is jobless, broke, has lost his family and being evicted from the building, and characters played by Casey Affleck, Michael Pena, Gabourey Sidibe (her second film since her Oscar nomination) as a Jamaican whose father would crack safes, and - well, Kovacs decides they need someone more familiar with crime and enlists Slide ( Eddie Murphy), a loud-talking dude from the street in his neighborhood. Obviously, this requires stealing the car from the penthouse, where there's no door or elevator that can handle it. They're looking for a wall safe, but then discover Shaw's Ferrari is solid gold: $65 million is hidden in plain sight. Enraged, Kovacs recruits a team to break into the apartment. So dear old Lester and all the others are penniless. The FBI is on the job because Shaw has been running a Ponzi scheme, and among his loot are the pension plan and investments of the tower's employees. It was taken apart piece by piece, he explains to FBI agent Claire Denham ( Tea Leoni), and assembled there. His most prized possession is a bright red 1953 Ferrari, once owned by Steve McQueen. The penthouse is owned by Arthur Shaw (Alan Alda), a financial wheeler-dealer, whose walls display priceless modern art. His team works flawlessly, beginning with the beloved doorman Lester (Stephen Henderson). The story: Josh Kovacs (Ben Stiller) is the perfectionist building manager at the most luxurious condo skyscraper in New York, which providentially is on Columbus Circle, in the exact footprint of Trump Tower. It's funny in an innocent screwball kind of way. There is also the novelty that here is a comedy that doesn't go heavy on the excremental, the masturbatory and symphonies of four-letter words. It's the kind of story where the executives at a pitch meeting feel they're being bludgeoned over the head with box-office dollars. The movie is broad and clumsy, and the dialogue cannot be described as witty, but a kind of grandeur creeps into the screenplay by Ted Griffin and Jeff Nathanson.
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