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The 99% Strikes Back
“Tower Heist”
By: The Film Informant
“Tower Heist”
By: The Film Informant
The staff that runs the Tower, New York City’s priciest high-rise apartment building in Brett Ratner’s new film, “Tower Heist,” shares something in common with Occupy Wall Street: they’re both in the bottom 99-percent income bracket. Josh Kovacs (Ben Stiller), the Tower’s building manager, could very well be one of the protesters camping out in Zuccotti Park under the skyscrapers of Lower Manhattan with a sign that reads, “We are the 99%.” Only while OWS objects to the entire banking system, Kovacs’ problems are with just one banker.
Namely, Arthur Shaw (Alan Alda), the Tower’s penthouse resident and one of the richest bankers in New York. And when Shaw flushes the Tower staff’s pensions away in a pseudo-Ponzy scheme, Kovacs doesn’t just go to the park, he sets out to rob Shaw blind.
As written by Ted Griffin and Jeff Nathanson, sharing story credit with Adam Cooper and Bill Collage, “Tower Heist” is a formulaic farce that nonetheless hooks from start to finish with fleshed out characters whose high-stakes problems are, in today’s world, all too relatable.
The dynamic interplay between Kovacs, our Robin Hood, and Arthur Shaw, the king from whom Kovacs aims to rob to give to the poor, so to speak, is the movie’s driving force, and in setting the duo up Ratner doesn’t miss a beat.
Shaw, an investment banker whose net worth puts him in the top 1-percent, wakes up every morning fifty-two stories above Central Park amongst “white neighbors.” He kicks off the day with a swim, eyes locked with his beloved, Benjamin Franklin, i.e., a larger-than-life $100 bill plastered across the bottom of his penthouse pool. On the other side of the river and in the bottom 99-percent is Kovacs, who wakes up in Queens closer to earth with an ex-con neighbor. He gets his morning exercise walking to work.
Ratner masterfully contrasts the Tower’s luxuriant, WASP-y veneer with the teeming underworld of ethnically diverse staffers whom Kovacs leads. Maids, doormen, security guards, concierges, shoe shiners and bellhops, harking from all corners of the globe scurry about the Tower’s austere back rooms endeavoring to meet their guests’ every whim and fancy, no matter how condescending or arrogant.
But Shaw treats that staff like they’re his old frat brothers, insisting that, even though he’s got his own private island in Belize, he’s still just an Astoria boy like Kovacs. Alan Alda gives Shaw a subtlety that’s otherwise absent from the movie. His initial specious grins yield insidiously to evil sneers — as the truth is revealed so is his inner malice, which seeps out drip by snobbish drip.
Turns out Shaw, who agreed to handle all Tower staff pensions and triple their worth, is a fraud. After he’s taken into FBI custody Kovacs must inform his staff that their pensions have evaporated. It’s from these dire straights that Kovaks resolves to round up a band of Merry Men and rob Shaw for all he’s worth: a “safety net” of cash hidden somewhere in his cavernous apartment.
That’s when Eddie Murphy, who delivers a career reviving performance as Slide, Kovacs’ ex-con neighbor, comes into the picture. Kovacs hires Slide to lead a class in Robbery-101 for the Merry Men, a crew of down & out characters that includes a former Burger King employee, Enrique (Michael Pena); Kovacs’ brother-in-law, Charlie (Casey Affleck); and a fired financial manager and former Tower resident, Mr. Fitzhugh (Matthew Broderick).
The unlikely bandits strike a chemistry that makes for one of the funniest groups of misfit men since “The Hangover.” In a picture of foolishness, Ratner bunches them together at a white table cloth restaurant across from the Tower (Slide’s treating, though not with money). As the stooges peer out the window through binoculars and formulate a plan, it seems utterly hopeless. At the eleventh hour they’re joined by Odessa, played by Gabourey Sidibe (“Precious”) who can go toe-to-toe for laughs with Murphy.
Early in pre-production the film’s working title was “Trump Heist.” Despite the use of Trump’s unmistakable building, the title was scrapped for one more anonymous and perhaps politically safe – “Tower Heist.” Doubtless, Trump didn’t want his brand associated with such fictional corporate villains as Shaw.
But when pitches for “Trump Heist” first circulated Hollywood in 2005 such concerns were non-existent and for Trump the title was likely good for business. Financial markets were still three years from collapse, nobody knew the name Bernie Madoff, and “occupy” was just another word.
But as those protesters in Zucattie Park and others like them in hundreds of cities worldwide will tell you, it’s a different world today. The 24-hour news cycle runs endless reports on high unemployment, the threat of default, and the villainous Shaws of Wall Street who are to blame. Into such a world “Tower Heist,” a topical and riotously funny comedy, enters quintessentially as a welcome diversion, at least for the bottom 99%.
