Tower Heist (10/10)

by Tony Medley

Run time 104 minutes.

OK for children.

Sparked by the return of the old Eddie Murphy of Beverly Hills Cop fame, this is laugh out loud funny, with a terrific cast of accomplished comedians, including Murphy, Casey Affleck, Matthew Broderick, Michael Peña, Alan Alda, and Judd Hirsch. With Ben Stiller as the glue, this is a throwback to old-fashioned Hollywood movies that are simply funny. It has no need for lots of profanity, although there is some (how could there not be with Murphy in the cast?), or toilet or genital humor, the latter of which has become one of Stiller's staples. Fortunately, here Stiller is not playing it for laughs, leaving the humor up to people who are actually funny.

Stiller recruits them all to stage a revenge robbery of bad guy investor Alda's penthouse condominium of $14 million, and it quickly descends into a fine screwball comedy.

Murphy took a two decade vacation from quality, producing one bomb after another, one horrible performance after another. Now he's gone back to his roots and the result is a film that is as funny as he is, because he's just one of a myriad of fine comedians. While the film has a fine script (apparently a jumble that resulted from the efforts of Ted Griffin and Jeff Nathanson with story credits to Griffin, Adam Cooper, and Bill Collage, too many credits for what became a good movie), the person to whom this film owes its quality is director Brett Ratner, who shows that he knows what pace is and how to use it.

There is one scene, for example, where the cast is planning the heist from Alda. It digresses from planning the theft and descends into a discussion of lesbians that is a classic example of perfect timing, one of the many scenes that caused me to laugh out loud. Ratner paces this scene so that each line is funnier than the one that preceded it, but doesn't linger. He gets the laughs and moves on.

The result is a brilliant comedy that I could see again, and that's about the highest praise I can give a film.