Movie Day: Tower Heist

My wife and I have this arranged date every week to catch a movie a week mostly on a Wednesday at GSC (cause it’s only RM7 per tix and if we end up watching a crappy movie, we don’t feel the pinch). We’ve kept this practice for the past 7 years ever since we were dating in college to working to married life and to having a baby. Of course we were lucky enough that my in-laws stays really near so we can drop the baby off for the night and have some alone time by ourselves (with 100+ ppl in the cinema).

Last week, we managed to catch “Tower Heist” featuring Ben Stiller and Eddie Murphy. Was a little apprehensive at first to watch the movie cause Ben Stiller was the featured actor. I really hate movies where toilet jokes are made and Ben Stiller is notoriously known to me to have made the most disgusting toilet jokes in his other movie “Along Came Polly (2004)”. So even though it’s been 6 years and he’s acted in some really good movies (without disgusting toilet jokes) – Starsky & Hutch, Meet the Fockers, Dodgeball & Night at the Museum, the thought of him and his disgusting-ness still lingers. Eddie Murphy on the other hand… I totally love his movies!

Tower Heist is generally about a tower (premium class condominium) and how the employees were conned out of their money to invest with the owner (Arthur Shaw) of the tower (ala Madoff style). Ben Stiller acts as the manager of the building (Josh Kovacs) who entrusted the employee’s retirement fund to Shaw who ended up being investigated by the FBI for fraud. In a bid to regain back the fund, he devices a plan to break into the Shaw’s penthouse to break open a safe presumably containing enough millions to return to the employees. Eddie Murphy (Slide) is recruited to train and assist them for the heist.

Shitty:

The movie starts off with some vagina jokes which really put me off. It seemed like the joke was intentionally made just to try to make the movie more sellable to some shallow minded pig who gets high on low level jokes.

Good:

The movie as a whole was a really good movie to watch. It was not only funny but it also connected well with the reality of being an employee, especially a blue collar one (doorman, concierge, liftman etc). A lot of focus was concentrated on how much the savings meant for the employees (even though it didn’t seem like a lot), the various difficulty they faced and the condition of their day to day at work (ie employee-employer relationship, employee-residence relationship).

Great:

Originality of comedy. It’s very rare these days to watch a movie where the jokes, actions and script is original and not something like you’ve seen or heard before repeated over and over again (especially true in romantic comedies). The only other movie that had so much originality would have been “Johnny English: Reborn”.

It was really great to be surprise at the funni-ness of the things that they did and the unexpected ending. We had a good laugh throughout the movie and came out feeling really good and satisfied that we’ve watched a great movie.