TITLE: Tower Heist
STARRING: Ben Stiller, Eddie Murphy, Casey Affleck, Alan Alda, Matthew Broderick
DIRECTOR: Brett Ratner
STUDIO: Imagine Entertainment, Relativity Media, Universal Pictures
RATING: PG-13
RUN TIME: 104 min
RELEASE DATE: November 4, 2011

By Seth Miller
Staff Writer, Part-Time Ninja

Here’s a pretty obvious generation gap for you readers. When I say the name Eddie Murphy, what movies do you think of first?  Most people from the ’80s and early ’90s think of good movies like Coming to America and Beverly Hills Cop; everybody else would have probably said Shrek and way too many shitty family movies. I don’t know what exactly happened that caused him to change from Axel Foley to wearing a fat suit in every movie, but the old Eddie Murphy is back in the new film Tower Heist. However, the rest of the film doesn’t hold up as well.

Josh Kovacs (Stiller) is the building manager of a deluxe apartment building for the rich. Arthur Shaw (Alda), one of the richest men in the building, is revealed to be a running a Ponzi scheme and stealing the pension funds of the building’s staff. Kovacs decides to pull a heist to get back all the money that has been taken from them; to pull this off, he brings in the help of a thief (Murphy) he grew up with and a motley crew of the building staff to pull off the robbery.

Murphy is barely in the first half of the film, and for that it suffers. The rest of the cast is pretty generic stock characters with one dimension. In other words, the first half doesn’t offer much of anything in terms of entertainment. Although it does have the thematic tone of the working class being cheated out of everything by Wall Street thieves, it’s been done before and it’s uneven throughout the film, but it works pretty well when used properly.

When Murphy really shows up in the second half, that’s when the movie picks up. He has great energy that he is applying to the kind of character that made him famous in the past. The rest of the cast picks up the pace with him and Tower Heist gets a bit funnier and a bit more entertaining.

The heist at the end of the film is pretty fun, even though the logical buildup to it has some holes and the actual heist has some glaring problems with how it is accomplished. It feels like it was written more like an afterthought instead of something that was planned and developed while writing the movie, which is pretty sad considering they had four writers working on the script.

Tower Heist has a lot of problems and it’s not going to be a classic comedy or heist film, but it is an enjoyable diversion for the weekend.

RATING: 5.5/10