Tower Heist (2011) - Ratner's so-so financial crisis comedy

♥♥♥

The two comedy stars of Brett Ratner's Tower Heist

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The staff of one of New York's most exclusive penthouse buildings, The Tower, are deprived of their pensions, when it turns out that the owner is a swindler. But their leader Kovacs (Ben Stiller (While We're Young (2014))) has a plan!

Tower Heist brings together an impressive cast in a handsome, enthusiastic movie with a spectacular heist, (during the Thanksgiving parade, with a gold car out of the building (...!)), a well made score by Christophe Beck (Frozen (2013)) and fine photography by Dante Spinotti (Heat (1995)).
And yet this heist comedy, which puts Stiller and Eddie Murphy (Dreamgirls (2006)) in the same frame for the first time, never results in any raucous laughter. It also contains some pretty weak characters and just enough disingenuous plot points that it stays too grounded to really succeed.
It is written by Ted Griffin (Ocean's Eleven (2001)) and Jeff Nathanson (Rush Hour 2 (2001)), with story contributions from a handful of others, and directed by Brett Ratner (Money Talks (1997)). The film is based on an idea of Murphy's, presented in 2005, which was to be an all-black ensemble comedy called Trump Heist. - Ironically, this sounds potentially more promising than the Tower Heist that eventually came to be.

Watch the trailer for the movie here

Cost: 75 mil. $ (after 10 mil. $ in tax rebates)
Box office: 152.9 mil. $
= Minor flop
[Tower Heist unsurprisingly sparked some diva behavior, as Stiller and Murphy were brought together with Stiller getting 15 mil. $ to play the lead in the film devised and co-produced by Murphy, who got 'just' 7.5 mil. $: Murphy, whose career was nowhere near Stiller's at the time, (granted), would only film an alternate ending if he was paid an additional 500k $. Universal had a plan to release the film on VoD just three weeks after its theatrical release as a test, but had to abandon the plan after cinema chains threatened to dump the film if they did. Tower Heist opened #2 with a 24 mil. $ first weekend in North America, (behind Puss in Boots), and grossed 78 mil. $ (51 % of the total gross) domestically.]

What do you think of Tower Heist?