Tower Heist - Blu-ray Review

'it's the type of film you want to pat on the head and say 'nice try' to. Sure, you might be being a bit facetious, but it's only because it started being a dick first'

If you're looking for an example of just how thin Tower Heist's script is then look no further than the very beginning of the heist. In other such films you might have got an elaborate building entry, a convoluted story that involved duping several people with a clever slight of hand or misdirection. In Tower Heist you get Snoopy and a copy of French Playboy.

The whole thing plays out on this sort of level. Even when it thinks it's being clever its not. The final reveal, for example, doesn't make a whole lot of sense when you think about it and the fact that it prances around showing how it modelled the whole thing around a chess game - like it's the first film to ever think of this - would be endearing if it wasn't so flippantly annoying. It's the type of film you want to pat on the head and say 'nice try' to. Sure, you might be being a bit facetious, but it's only because it started being a dick first.

The problems, suffice to say, are largely of director Brett Ratner's making, although he does get 'help' from screenwriters Ted Griffin and Jeff Nathanson. It's very difficult to warm to a film where one character declares 'Steve McQueen is my little bitch'. It's even harder to warm to a film though that gives you no reason to like any of its characters. Lead Ben Stiller is OK and Matthew Broderick as a schlubby ex-banker is well cast but everyone else suffers from too little time on screen and not enough background. The love interest (Téa Leoni), who should have formed a touching, if predictable, part of the narrative, is given one pretty good scene in a bar and then abandoned. Who needed heart any way.

It eventually boils down to a watery soup of an ending, which leaves with a self-satisfied smug smile on its face but not a whole lot more. There's no memorable jokes, the heist, which forms the sole action sequence, isn't great and the characters are anonymous. To prove their worth to real hoodlum Eddie Murphy, several of the main group are told to go off and steal something from a department store, an action rife with comic potential, you might think. They return with a Gap jumper, some underwear, a candle and some trainers. That's the comic level this film operates on.

This post in association with Zavvi.