Tower Heist

STARRING

Ben Stiller as Josh Kovacs

Eddie Murphy as Slide

Casey Affleck as Charlie

Alan Alda as Arthur Shaw

Matthew Broderick as Mr Fitzhugh

Téa Leoni as Agent Denham

Gabourey Sidibe as Odessa

As the opening credits rolled on this movie, my eyes kept getting wider. This is a pretty big talent pool, and as we know large casts like this always do well!

... well, not if you're Movie 43. Or New Year's Eve. Still!

Tower Heist is the tale of a guy named Josh Kovacs. Ol' Josh is the building manager of The Tower, an upper-crust condominium in downtown New York. Josh's job is to know everything about everyone who lives in the tower and take care of them, because they're all absurdly rich. In Josh's employ is the hapless Charlie, the concierge, whose wife is eight months pregnant and is also Josh's sister. We're also introduced to Enrique Deveraux (Michael Peña), whose dream it is to move up from the BK (aka Burger King) to the Big Time in customer service. Josh's favourite tenant is the billionaire Arthur Shaw, and it seems his lips are permanently attached to Shaw's butt. Josh and Shaw play online chess, Josh picks up Shaw's dry cleaning, gets his mail... and Alan Alda uses his old Hawkeye Pierce charm to win Josh over.

Then Shaw is arrested for securities fraud. He's apparently penniless, living off the money he stole from The Tower's pension fund after Josh entrusted him with the portfolio. When the doorman tries to commit suicide over the loss of his pension, Josh loses his shit. He takes Charlie and Deveraux up to Shaw's apartment where he's under house arrest, yells at the man, and then proceeds to go all Jack Nicholson on an old Ferrari that used to belong to Steve McQueen. The building ownership (represented by Judd Hirsch) doesn't take too kindly to this and fires all three men.

Desperate, Josh tries to sell Shaw out to the FBI. He ends up having drinks with Agent Denham, who drunkenly tells him that there's twenty million dollars unaccounted for. It's simply gone. With his intimate knowledge of the building, Josh figures the money is being held in a wall that Shaw didn't remove during a major renovation project several years ago. He recruits Deveraux, Charlie, the recently-evicted Mr Fitzhugh, and his criminal neighbour Slide to try and rob Shaw.

I couldn't help but notice how Same-y this movie was. Ben Stiller plays a Ben Stiller character, all intense one minute and completely bungling the next. He's also very obviously wearing mascara in several scenes. Matthew Broderick plays a slightly more confident Leo Bloom, his character from The Producers. Casey Affleck plays an idiot, something he seems to play in every role (with the exception of Gone Baby Gone). Eddie Murphy is Token Black Criminal. Yawn.

Some of the more surprising laughs came from Gabourey Sidibe's character, Odessa. I haven't seen Precious, so I wasn't familiar with her acting chops before this one. It felt like she was holding back for most of the movie. Alan Alda plays Shaw as a smarmy asshole, which is refreshing for me as I know him best as the aforementioned Hawkeye. I will say this for Stiller, though: despite being a Ben Stiller character, I didn't spend the entire movie wanting to punch him like I usually do. I tell you, if you want to make sure I don't see a movie, put Stiller with Nicolas Cage. *shudder*

Despite some interesting twists (and a few shudder moments during the climax... if you have vertigo, prepare to cover your face when you see Deveraux on the roof), this movie is, as I said earlier, Same-y. It's reasonably predictable, and the laughs aren't as frequent as I'd like. Eddie Murphy is completely wasted here, but since he hasn't had a quality movie where he isn't a donkey in about 15 years, it's not like he's got top-drawer scripts being sent his way. Again, much like Pacific Rim, I felt they could have done so much more with the material they had here. There are plot points that feel like they were thrown in because it was convenient for the scriptwriters. I would have liked a bit more time exploring Slide and Odessa's relationship, because it's one of the few times Murphy's character isn't channeling Chris Tucker in Rush Hour. A few loose ends, like the sparks between Josh and Denham, go nowhere and are unresolved by the movie's end. Hasty editing? Possibly. Of course, the answer to my gripes is probably summed up in two words: Brett Ratner. The director. Hey, there's Rush Hour again!


FINAL REVIEW
Tower Heist
2.5 snowflakes out of 5

TL;DR - An unoffensive movie. You could do worse than watch it, but it'll leave you wanting more.

edit: Apparently, I forgot Eddie Murphy's role in Dream Girls when I was slagging him in this post. My bad.

Pacific Rim

Starring

Idris Elba as Stacker Pentecost

Charlie Hunnam as Raleigh Becket

Rinko Kikuchi as Mako Mori

Charlie Day as Dr Newton Geizler

Ron Perlman as Hannibal Chau

Movie viewed in IMAX 3D on 13 July, 2013

I went into this movie after stellar reviews from friends and critics. I was ready to be absolutely blown away by the sheer power of awesome.

Well, the special effects were above top-drawer. Everything else? Less so.

A bit of "plot" summary: In a refreshing new take on alien invasion, the 250 foot tall invaders - called "Kaiju", a Japanese word meaning "strange creature" - come from a dimensional rift in the bottom of the Pacific Ocean. These kaiju run roughshod over Earth as only giant monsters can, until we decided to fight back by building giant robots called Evangelion Jaegers (German for "hunters") to kill them. And kill them we did! Sure, cities like San Francisco get the everlovin' shit knocked out of them, but WE KILT THEM ALIENS GOOD *hock ptoo*. The robots are piloted by humans who use a neural interface to control the machine's movements, but the sheer size of the machines is too much for a single human brain. Instead, they use teenagers a two-pilot system to share the neural load in a process called "drifting" that links the minds of the pilots. Their thoughts are your thoughts, your memories are their memories... it's all very Vulcan.

In the movie's opening, we are introduced to the pilots of a Jaeger called Gipsy Danger. The pilots, the improbably named Raleigh Becket and his older brother Yancy, are sent out into the ocean off the coast of Alaska to fight a giant monster. Their commanding officer (played by the awesome Idris Elba) orders them to ignore the fate of a 10-man fishing boat in favour of saving the millions of lives this Kaiju will end should it make landfall.

So guess what the Becket boys do?

In the ensuing chaos, the Kaiju rips half of Gipsy Danger's head off and kills Yancy. As Raleigh will repeat almost as often as Spider-Man blathered on about great power and great responsibility, he was still in Yancy's head when he died. He felt all the pain, fear, blah blah blah. Raleigh manages to control Gipsy Danger on his own long enough to get back to land where he's found by a boy and his grandfather. Then TIME PASSES.

It's seven years later. Half-Life 3 still isn't out. Becket is still in Alaska, helping to build "the Wall of Life", a waste of fictional taxpayers' fictional money that is supposed to stop a Kaiju dead in its tracks. Stacker shows up and uses his Powers of Motivational Speech to convince the PTSD poster boy Becket to rejoin the fight, which was about as difficult as convincing me to eat bacon.

After some more inspiring orchestral music, Our Heroes arrive at The Hall of Justice, or something. The UN (with a Canadian representative! He even gets a line! WOO WE'VE BEEN VALIDATED) has decided that the effective way to kill the Kaiju is bad because sometimes stuff gets wrecked, so they're gonna go with the wall thing (SPOILER: The walls don't work). Stacker ain't got time for that, so The Hall of Justice is now "the resistance" and they've got a few Jaeger allies from around the world who, aside from Grizzled Australian Veteran and His Asshole Son, barely get any lines.

As we're being introduced to the mush-mouthed Aussies (seriously, could ANYONE figure out what they were saying?), we're also introduced to a cute little Japanese character named Mako Mori. She's our token Neon Genesis Evangelion tribute. Take a look at her and tell me she doesn't look familiar...

Google "Rei Ayanami" if you don't get it. Just make sure Safe Search is on.

Turns out "Miss Mori's" family got offed by a Kaiju and she Wants Revenge. Stacker ain't got time for that either, and is Dead Set Against letting Mako co-pilot the rebuilt Gipsy Danger with Becket until Becket says "dude, seriously". Then it's on like Donkey Kong until both Becket and Mako drift and have flashbacks to their traumatic backstories. This is when we find out that Stacker had time to adopt the young Mako, and... Jesus, is this REALLY the plot?

I'm really struggling to figure out what was good about this movie other than the special effects. LucasFilm's Industrial Light & Magic outdid themselves, that's for certain. The only effects complaint I have is that it's obvious the 3D was tacked on at the end, because there's no obvious scenes that utilized it. The 3D phenomenon that was started by Avatar has turned into a way for studios to make an extra $3 on tickets and stymie people with video cameras in the audience.

This film also suffers from "here's a guy who's integral to the plot but we can't be arsed to tell you his name" with the two scientists tasked to Find Out What The Kaiju Want. There's the weird British George McFly/Sheldon Cooper fusion (turns out his name's Herman) and Screams Almost As Much As Shia LeBeouf Guy (or "Newton", as IMDB.com tells me). Then there's "supporting cast we introduced to be either ethnic stereotypes or cannon fodder", aka the Russian and Chinese Jaeger pilots. The Russians frown a lot and act aloof! The Chinese guys are REALLY good at ping-pong!

As you may have guessed, this movie disappointed me. Perhaps it was my friends on Facebook losing their shit over how much they loved what they saw. Maybe I just expect too much from director Guillermo del Toro. Maybe I like a little steak with my sizzle. Don't get me wrong, it's a Perfectly Serviceable Popcorn Flick. Reviews, both critical and from your friends, might make you think this is the Second Coming of Star Wars (the original, not the prequels) or Indiana Jones. It's not. It's fun, but Pacific Rim left me with a kind of empty feeling and wishing it could have been more.

FINAL REVIEW
Pacific Rim

3 snowflakes out of 5

TL;DR - Come for the special effects. Just don't expect too much more.