Pluskylang Great Film overall

ClassyWas Excellent, smart action film.

Teringer An Exercise In Nonsense

Humbersi The first must-see film of the year.

jimandemmamae My husband and I feel we wasted an evening watching it.

JLRVancouver "Tower Heist" starts fine: Ben Stiller is the general manager of a posh New York apartment building, who having found out that he had turned over all of the staff's pension monies to an alleged swindler (Alan Alda), plans an elaborate heist to steal the money back. The movie then follows the usual heist trajectory: assemble the team, plan the job, deal with the usual complications (in this case comic), hit the target... To this point, the film is a pretty good light-weight heist-comedy. Then there is a 'plot twist' and the last third of the movie is just stupid. Any further discussions would contain major spoilers, so I'll leave it at that.

jc-osms This comedy caper movie, probably with the emphasis on the latter, strayed reasonably well but grew more ridiculous as it went on and as these films tend to do, drops the laughs altogether in pursuit of a memorable feel-good finish. So far, so clichéd, but in my opinion the comedy in the first half, aided by a thinly-veiled attack on the greed of corporate America, personified in the pompous, superior and patronising super-rich Bernie Madoff- type banker, played by Alan Alda, exceeded the ridiculous heist scene itself which involves trying to get a motorcar down from the top of a New York skyscraper during the Macy's Thanksgiving Parade.Ben Stiller is the hotel manager who runs a tight ship and knows every inch of his multi- storey territory, catering to every whim of his multi-millionaire clientèle, including super- smug Alda, even playing on-line chess with him and fatally trusting the arch-swindler with the pension funds of all the hotel employees. When Alda's Arthur Shaw character is outed as a crook, he unsurprisingly has a solicitor team in place bound to get him off, forcing Stiller and his band of merry service-men, including Casey Affleck, Matthew Broderick and eventually street-savvy Eddie Murphy in a cunning plan to get their money back in one go.Those early comedy scenes probably climax with the shoplifting trials Murphy sets his novice burglars but after that things get very silly as the team go after Alda's car and get involved in ludicrous stunts which see a classic car suspended high above New York's streets and unlikely feats by Stiller and his crew which Tom Cruise and his MI team would struggle to pull off. Stiller for me seems somewhat typecast now in these kind of frazzled good-guy parts but of course this is as nothing compared to the irritating jive-ass part played for the umpteenth time by Eddie Murphy. Better were Alda as the big-time crook and Tea Leoni as the FBI agent with torn loyalties.It's a shame the writers got carried away with the idea of the high-tower heist itself as it really detracts from the comedic potential of the rest of the movie. That was one plot idea they really should have hung out to dry.

slightlymad22 Since the first Shrek movie, Eddie Murphy seemed to have been doing his best to prove to everyone that his best movies are now where he is heard and not seen. However here he gives a performance as good as some of his earlier work.As for the rest if the cast, although a straight man, Casey Affleck shows a talent for comedy rarely seen in his filmography, Tea Leoni is hot rather than a hard nosed, Matthew Broderick puts in his best performance for years and Alan Alda is always a delight to watch! However Ben Stiller is once again doing his usual nice guy Ben Stiller routine. It's more than a bit tiresome and boring now, as (with the exception of Dodgeball and Zoolander) he is always playing the same role. There are a few loose ends at the end of the movie, but overall it was an enjoyable ninety minutes.