Tower Heist: Capsule Review

Another message movie for our times. This movie starts out with some wonderful character development, especially with the supporting cast of Tea Leoni. We don’t really see as much of her as we should, but then, we don’t see a lot of people in the disjointed plot where the set-up is laid out in the first thirty or forty minutes.
This homage to “the little guy” who was kicked around by Wall Street is held together by Ben Stiller. He is the glue around which Eddie Murphy and Matthew Broderick and Alan Alda and others spin an essentially funny story about the desperation born of our failure to see the system of greed and corporation represented by “The Man” (in this case: Alan Alda as Bernie Madoff) for what he really is.
This is a message movie wrapped in a comedy. The message is fleeting but the comedy is good enough to hold us in our seats to see how it all turns out. That is enough to ask for in this thin movie season…