Tower Heist (2011)

This one will be brief.

I'm racing the deadline of posting all the movies I saw in February actually IN February. Well, that and "Tower Heist" wasn't so much bad or even unmemorable as it was OK, which is always pretty hard to talk about, because what are you supposed to say about something that's just...OK?

I remember hearing about how this was supposed to be Eddie Murphy's return to form after not being relevant for what seems like 15 years. Now see, I remember when Eddie Murphy was popular. But that was so long ago that it's hard to remember a time when a trailer for one of his movies was met with anything other than an eye-roll and someone in the back of the theater loudly groaning "Really, dude? Just retire already." Actually, come to think of it, most of the time that guy in the back was me.

After seeing "Tower Heist" I think that the best I can say about Eddie Murphy is that at the very least, it's a step in the right direction. It's not a glorious comeback akin to a Phoenix rising from the ashes like we would have liked to have seen, but it's not brutally painful like his movies normally are. It's also nice to see him NOT in drag.

Honestly, the biggest thing is that he can swear in this. I know it sounds juvenile to say that because he can swear, it means that it's better, but whenever I see Eddie Murphy in one of those stupid kid movies I can't help but feel like I'm watching a lion in a cage, pacing back and forth, wishing that he didn't have to be there. It would be like Bill Hicks being on "Blue's Clues." It would only end in tears and lawsuits.

It's just nice to see Eddie Murphy with some semblance of dignity, reminding us that he actually is a pretty funny guy.

Let's hear it for crawling your way back up the ladder to "average."

The rest of the cast manages to be entertaining as well, although with the possible exception of Matthew Broderick, none of them are quite as funny as Eddie Murphy. Broderick manages to come off as sad and pathetic as a live-action Gill from "The Simpsons," and as bad as I felt for laughing at him he was pretty hilarious. As far as the rest of the cast goes, it was all par for the course. Ben Stiller was Ben Stiller and Casey Affleck talked like he was constantly stoned. All is as it should be.

 

If there was a glaring issue I took with the movie, it would have been the ending. Now there are endings that are ambiguous and endings that just end. I don't mind the former. This one was of the later. Had I seen this in theaters I would have had a hard time guessing whether the movie was done or if the last reel hadn't been sent and the projectionist just said "screw it" and ran it anyways. There was a definite sense that the movie should have gone on other 5 minutes so that all the loose ends were tied up.

Oh, and by the way. Where the crap can you go to hock car parts made entirely out of gold? Just a question.

While it may seem like I don't have much to say about "Tower Heist," well you would be correct. It was good, but it was that weird kind of good where you don't have much to say about it afterwards. Almost as if someone typed in "HEIST/COMEDY/ENSEMBLE-CAST.EXE." into a MovieMakerMatic 4000 and "Tower Heist" was the result.

THE BOTTOM LINE - "Tower Heist" was decently entertaining. It's neither overly good nor bad. If you want a few laughs, you could do far worse than this. See it if you get a chance, but don't go out of your way to.