Queens native Josh Kovacs has managed one of the most luxurious and well-secured residences in New York City for more than a decade. Under his watchful eye, nothing goes undetected. In the swankiest unit atop Josh's building, Wall Street titan Arthur Shaw is under house arrest after being caught stealing two billion from his investors. The hardest hit among those he defrauded? The tower staffers whose pensions he was entrusted to manage. With only days before Arthur gets away with the perfect crime, Josh's crew turns to petty crook Slide to plan the nearly impossible…to steal what they are sure is hidden in Arthur's guarded condo. Though amateurs, these rookie thieves know the building better than anyone. Turns out they've been casing the place for years, they just didn't know it. - skip ad - Genres: Action/Adventure, Comedy, Crime/Gangster and Drama Release Date: November 4th, 2011 (wide) MPAA Rating: PG-13 for language and sexual content. Cast And Credits Starring: Ben Stiller, Eddie Murphy, Casey Affleck, Alan Alda Directed by: Brett Ratner Produced by: Brian Grazer, Eddie Murphy, Kim Roth

Rich guys are among the most reliable villains in Hollywood movies, and it takes no special insight to point out that the guys who make and star in those movies tend to be pretty well off themselves. You can call this hypocrisy, but I prefer to think of it as one of the cultural contradictions of capitalism that all of us have to live with.




Today’s specimen is “Tower Heist,” an action comedy produced by Brian Grazer, directed by Brett Ratner and starring Ben Stiller and Eddie Murphy. The previous sentence could be expressed mathematically as a whole bunch of zeros, which is to say that the $20 million that is one object of the heist in question is small change. The movie’s makers and marketers surely expect to take much more than that from you and your friends in the next 48 hours or so, and you could do worse than to chip in your share, with a little something extra for the Coca-Cola Company.

What you will receive in return (in addition to high-fructose corn syrup) is a mild, chaotic and cartoonish dose of populism, set in a Manhattan luxury high-rise at the southwestern corner of Central Park from which the name “Trump” has been excised with the utmost digital care. At the top of this heap lives Arthur Shaw, a Wall Street titan played with twinkly malevolence by Alan Alda.

Mr. Alda, who spent years on “M*A*S*H” turning himself into a paradigm of niceness, has since relished subverting that image, and he generously supplies occasions for the audience to snarl and hiss and gasp at him in indignant disbelief. A genial plutocrat, Shaw fancies himself a man of the people. He loves to remind Josh Kovaks, the building’s manager (Mr. Stiller), that they grew up in the same Queens neighborhood, and he is generally expert at disguising his condescension as bonhomie.

Shaw also turns out to be a Bernard Madoff-like Ponzi schemer, or perhaps something worse (or at least easier to explain in a 10- or 15-second burst of expository dialogue). Among the millions that have disappeared under his watch are the pension fund of the building’s staff and the life savings of a beloved doorman, Lester (Stephen McKinley Henderson), whose dreams of a comfortable retirement are shattered when the F.B.I. arrives to arrest Shaw for fraud.

It was Josh who had invested his colleagues’ money with Shaw, and so his outrage at the criminality of a man he had admired and envied is mingled with a sense of responsibility. He hatches a scheme to extract restitution, enlisting a bunch of other aggrieved parties, mostly fellow tower workers, to burgle Shaw’s penthouse during the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. Josh believes that $20 million in cash is hidden in a secret safe, though the real situation turns out to be much more complicated.

There are heist pictures that offer careful and detailed accounts of criminal procedure, generating suspense by focusing on the precise arrangements necessary to bring a brazen and improbable crime to fruition. “Tower Heist” is emphatically not one of those movies. Important plot points seem to have been edited away â€" or never bothered with in the first place â€" and credulity is strained at nearly every point, sometimes amusingly (as when a car dangles from a skyscraper, apparently unnoticed by the crowds below) and sometimes annoyingly.

If this is a Robin Hood story, it is more in the manner of Daffy Duck than Errol Flynn (or, heaven help us, Russell Crowe). Which is great â€" or would be if Mr. Ratner were daring or disciplined enough to unleash the full farcical anarchy that “Tower Heist” occasionally promises but rarely delivers. Josh has a motley crew backing him up, including Gabourey Sidibe as a housekeeper, Michael Peña as an elevator operator, Casey Affleck as a concierge and Matthew Broderick as an evicted tower tenant, an unemployed stock trader whose misery results from the general financial malaise rather than his upstairs neighbor’s corruption. They are abetted by a sympathetic F.B.I. agent (Téa Leoni) and coached by Slide, a hoodlum played by Mr. Murphy.

On the one hand, there is something a little dismaying about seeing Mr. Murphy in such a blatantly stereotypical role. In the movies, it seems, when a white guy wants to commit a crime, he hires an available black guy to teach him how to do it. “Horrible Bosses,” in which Jamie Foxx took on the mentor duties, at least tried for a hint of protective self-consciousness, but that might be too much to ask in this case.

On the other hand, though, Mr. Murphy’s blend of exuberance and hostility is just what “Tower Heist” needs. Younger viewers who know him only as Dr. Dolittle and the voice of Shrek’s sidekick Donkey will catch a glimpse of an earlier, more volatile performer, and conscientious parents will hasten to add “48 Hours,” “Trading Places” and the “Beverly Hills Cop” movies to the Netflix queue.

If only Mr. Stiller were in similarly strong form. Josh is closer to the anxious, frantic character he played in the “Night at the Museum” films than to his crazier comic inventions, which is a shame. And while we’re at it, what about Ms. Leoni, who was so marvelously and crazily paired with Mr. Stiller in “Flirting With Disaster”? If not for one pretty funny drunken scene, you would not know from watching “Tower Heist” that she is one of the sharpest and most resourceful comic actresses in movies.

Oh, well. Mediocre entertainment is not a crime â€" this is still America, dammit! â€" but “Tower Heist” could and should have been much more. Mr. Ratner goes for the safe bet and the easy score, which means that, for all his shows of solidarity with the working stiffs, he has more in common with the wealthy scam artist who took their hard-earned money.