Tower heist rotten tomatoes9/23/2023 And giving Murphy and Stiller one last emotional beat together-whether it was a warm buddy-buddy moment or an uneasy truce-would also have allowed Ratner to explore some of the race and class issues his movie only begins to touch on. It’s probably a loser’s game to ask for better craftsmanship from a movie like Tower Heist, but even crowd-pleasing big-budget comedies would seem to owe both of their top-billed actors a final scene. Murphy’s Slide never quite comes into focus in the screenplay by Ted Griffin and Jeff Nathanson-is he an amoral double-crosser, or does he come to identify with Stiller’s Robin Hood mission? Without giving too much away about the ending, I can say that Slide disappears much too abruptly from the story-unless I blinked and missed it, he’s entirely absent from the epilogue montage. Stiller’s Josh goes ballistic way too early in the film, and after his big meltdown scene in the crooked banker’s apartment, the character has no room left to grow. Ben Stiller and Eddie Murphy strike plenty of sparks off one another-Stiller is a master at communicating stifled resentment, and Murphy, in fine fettle, can get laughs with the tilt of an eyebrow-but the arcs of both characters, as well as the arc of their relationship, remain half-drawn. The combined efforts of this fine ensemble cast make Tower Heist go down easier than it otherwise might, but the film’s potential as a buddy comedy is sadly wasted. Together with a laid-off Wall Streeter who’s been evicted from the building (Matthew Broderick), they scheme to steal Shaw’s secret $20 million stash, which, according to the FBI agent assigned to the case (Téa Leoni), may be somewhere inside his apartment. But when Josh learns that Shaw has gambled away the employees’ retirement fund in a Ponzi scheme, he commits an unwise act that gets him fired from the Tower, along with his concierge brother-in-law (Casey Affleck) and an affable but dimwitted elevator operator (Michael Peña). When Shaw is arrested on charges of securities fraud, Josh’s first instinct is to believe in his claims of innocence, even to defend him to the Tower staff. It’s clear to the audience from the first shot-Shaw does laps in his own private rooftop swimming pool, painted to look like a $100 bill-that this man is a contemptible snake, but to the staff at the Tower, headed up by general manager Josh Kovacs (Ben Stiller), Shaw has always been a favorite resident: friendly, generous, and relatively undemanding. Alda’s Shaw owns the penthouse apartment in a hyperexclusive Manhattan building called “The Tower” (played, at least in some exterior shots, by Trump Tower).
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