Tower Heist Makes Me Angry

As a kid, I never got to have the birthday party where we all went to the movies and threw popcorn at each other. I remember a friend’s mom taking us to see For Richer or Poorer for some reason, and for three years in a row, my friend Joe’s parents took us all to see the newest Lord of the Rings movie. But me? No such party. One year, I went to a nearby parking lot to play football with my friends. When I was five, I unwrapped my brand-new Stretch Armstrong and pulled on one arm while a friend pulled on the other, and, uh, I accidentally slung him through a glass cabinet window. That was entertaining, but it was no trip to the movies.

So this weekend, I made a bunch of my adult friends go to the movies with me, and of course I chose Tower Heist. I love heist movies (well, I love Ocean’s Eleven, anyway) and I love comedies, so why not go see a dumb caper comedy while we’re all half-drunk? It’ll be stupid! It’ll be fun!

You guys, I hated everything — everything — about Tower Heist. At one point I started hitting myself in the face to dull the pain of what I was watching. The movie is so stupid that it’s condescending. Look: I can handle a stupid movie, but it infuriates me when a stupid movie assumes that I am also stupid. I hated this movie so much that to list everything I hate about it would literally make me boil with rage again.

So better put on some tea.

Eddie Murphy and some friends who also "know a lot about crime," according to Tower Heist

There are spoilers here, but hey, by spoiling the movie I’m doing you a favor. Don’t see it.

During the climax of Tower Heist, a runaway van supposedly carts away the loot (an old Ferrari said to have once belonged to Steve McQueen, but is really made of solid gold — but more on that later), and the entire time you, as an intelligent, attentive audience member, are thinking “That van’s obviously empty; this is boring.” But then the FBI pulls it over, and they open the back doors, and for a brief second you consider that this movie might do something interesting and show the car inside. But nope: it’s empty. And what’s worse, the FBI Agent says, “Oh no! It was a diversion!”

That, I believe, is when I hit myself. I couldn’t bear it any longer.

What made me so angry during the film is the utter disdain it seems to have for the audience. To explain the main motivation for the heist, we’re subjected to a pitiful scene where Ben Stiller — the building manager at a Trump Tower stand-in in New York’s Columbus Circle — has to explain to his staff of lovable blue-collar misfits that Alan Alda’s Madoff-esque shenanigans has sucked their pension funds dry. Soon afterwards, Stiller decides to steal $20 million from Alda’s penthouse so that he can give it to all his doggone-hard-workin’ employees. It’s a noble attempt at crafting emotional stakes, but what the filmmakers don’t realize is that none of us give a shit because not many of us really have pensions anyway. Yeah, it sucks that a bunch of people lost money to Bernie Madoff — but is that really relatable?

I don’t want to compare the movie too much to Ocean’s Eleven, because it seems like an honor that Tower Heist doesn’t deserve, but the main motivation behind that film’s heist was a dude screwing over his ex-wife’s douchey new husband. When George Clooney assembles his crack team, even those guys have basic relatable motives: Brad Pitt is bored and wants back in on some action; Eliot Gould wants revenge for a personal slight; Matt Damon wants to step beyond his father’s footsteps. In Tower Heist, the team is Ben Stiller, who gets fired because he smashes Alda’s car; Matthew Broderick, who lost his condo because he didn’t pay his mortgage; Eddie Murphy, who’s black and therefore “knows about crime.” What?

We’re told supposed to hate Alan Alda, because he stole a bunch of money and is kind of a dick sometimes. But there are two things wrong with this: first, they cast Alan Alda, who’s probably the most lovable actor of his generation (behind Alan Arkin). This is TV’s Hawkeye Pierce, for Christ’s sake. You don’t cast Hawkeye as the villain — unless it’s Donald Sutherland in the upcoming Hunger Games movie, because let’s be honest, as lovable as Sutherland’s Hawkeye was, didn’t it always felt just a little sinister to have a Canadian actor playing one of our nation’s heroes?

The Meanest Man in the World

But I digress. The second thing that’s wrong with Alda’s character is, if I remember correctly, early in the movie, there’s an entire scene where Alda hires a dude after Ben Stiller refuses to let him join his workforce of Darn Good Folk. Then that dude gets fired (because Ben Stiller smashes Alda’s car) and joins the heist crew, but the fact still remains that Alda seems to have a decent-enough soul to give people second chances, and in some ways that makes him even more likable than Stiller. Why isn’t Stiller the big dick who deserves to get burgled?

Do you see how maddening this movie is? I can’t even describe it without it sounding convoluted and condescending.

One last thing. At the end, after the crew has successfully stolen Alda’s solid-gold car, they dismantle it and send all the pieces to the pensionless employees so that they can retire in peace after all their years of hard work openin’ doors and scrubbin’ floors. The car, you see, was solid gold because that’s where Alda hid his money — in the car, by building its parts out of gold and painting over them. But all its parts are apparently gold. The carburetor? Gold. The fuel pump? Gold. The steering wheel, despite the fact that it’d be in plain view and therefore blatantly obvious that it’s a solid-gold car? Gold.

Again, there are two things wrong with this. One, why would he build a fucking fuel pump out of gold? Why wouldn’t he just mold one giant car-shaped piece of gold and paint over that? A car made of solid-gold parts isn’t going to run, and the individual solid-gold parts, once someone notices them, will very clearly be made of solid gold.

Two, and more importantly, having them ship all the parts individually to the workers is dumb. If I’m a working-class stiff — a Manhattan doorman, for God’s sake — am I going to know where to scrap a solid-gold wiper-blade motor for its full market value (47th Street, I guess)? Doubtful. In the end, the whole triumphant montage comes across as manipulative and cutesy, as some attempt to convince the audience they triumphed by showing The Little Guy smiling as he holds up a shining radiator. Isn’t that stuff technically evidence of the workers’ complicity in grand larceny?

C’mon, Tower Heist. We’re smarter than that.

Grrr!
– Bartelmus Cobb