You will see a lot of familiar faces in Tower Heist. I merely rented it from Netflix because it's one of my favorite genres, but as I watched the names go
by in the opening credits, I got more and more excited. Ben Stiller (Night at the Museum) can be hit or miss with me... but the names just kept rolling by: Alan Alda, Tea Leone, Eddie Murphy, Matthew Broderick... I thought this was going to be fantastic.
Here's the thing... it starts really, really slow. It takes a half-hour to set up the characters properly (probably because there are so many of them) and it was at that very point that my husband declared the movie crap and left the room... just before it was about to get good.
Arthur Shaw (Alda) is a Wall Street portfolio manager who resides at The Tower... a swanky Manhattan high-rise where the apartments are purchased for millions and the residents expect the best of everything from their staff. Enter Josh Kovacks (Stiller) the building manager who has worked The Tower for over a decade, and has the superior ability to anticipate and fulfill the residents' needs while keeping the staff running smoothly. When Shaw is arrested by the FBI for fraud, Kovacks reveals to the employees that he'd invested their entire pension fund with Shaw, and that the FBI thinks it's probably long gone. The Agency can't even locate his hidden money.
Kovacks goes ballistic and takes a golf club to Shaw's prize possession, a vintage Ferrari purportedly driven by Steve McQueen that was brought up piece by piece and assembled in Shaw's living room. Criminal resident or not, Kovacks is fired along with two employees who followed him up.
Angry and feeling guilty for losing the pension fund, Kovacks hatches a plan. As Kovacks says in the movie, he's been casing the building for years, he just didn't know it.
What follows is funny, tragic, and sometimes inspiring. I counted five laugh out loud moments, and there probably would have been more if I hadn't been interrupted repeatedly. One holy crap moment when Leone clotheslines Stiller during a chase scene and it took me by surprise. Also, what is with Matthew Broderick, vintage Ferraris, and glass windows? It's becoming a theme.
All in all, once you get through the setup (which is extensive) this is a heist movie that hits all the right notes. For less than $9 you can own the Blu-ray edition with included DVD and Ultraviolet formats, making it a must-add to almost any collection. I give it four and a half out of five stars... if the setup at the beginning had been a shade more concise, it would have been a perfect film.
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