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Leonard Maltin

Tower Heist

  • By Leonard Maltin
  • |
  • November 7, 2011 11:09 PM
  • |
  • 2 Comments

I’ve seen great caper movies, and this isn’t one of them. As mainstream Hollywood studio movies go, Tower Heist isn’t bad, and it will probably fulfill most audience’s desire for escapist fare. But despite some good laughs here and there and a couple of neat plot twists, it’s just not as clever as it seems to think it is. Even a recurring cat-and-mouse exchange about chess between the bad guy (billionaire-investor Alan Alda) and the good guy (Robin Hood-ish thief Ben Stiller) doesn’t pay off with a really satisfying punchline.

On the plus side, Tower Heist has a well-cast ensemble and makes great use of its mid-Manhattan location, including an incursion into the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. (I was more absorbed in those scenes—and trying to figure out how they were filmed—than I was in the “thrill” footage set many stories up in the sky. Now that computer imagery has made the impossible possible, it’s hard to be invested in those kind of stunts because we know—

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More: Film Reviews, Ben Stiller, Eddie Murphy, Casey Affleck, Michael Pena, Matthew Broderick

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Popular Posts

  • Studio Vaults Open—On DVD
  • Remembering Deanna Durbin
  • Sugar And Spice: Love Is All You Need
  • Movie-Buff Heaven: The TCM Classic Film Festival
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  • Disney, Hitchcock, and Marilyn Flying High
  • HOW TO PITCH A MOVIE…AND MORE
  • With Bogart On The African Queen
  • Greta's New Wave: Frances Ha
  • Star Trek Into Darkness
  • A Voyage Worth Taking: Kon-Tiki
  • The Incredible Shrinking 3-D Audience
  • Well-Forged: Iron Man 3
  • At Any Price
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