Tower Heist (2011)

Tower Heist arrives from 2011, a year when the financial crisis was still fresh enough to function as a premise and stale enough to function as a punchline. Brett Ratner directs with his usual efficient indifference, but the engine here is economic grievance. A Wall Street billionaire named Arthur Shaw, unmistakably a Madoff with better tailoring, has embezzled the pensions of the staff who polish his floors. The film's sympathies sit entirely with the doormen, maids, and elevator operators, and its climax asks us to cheer as they strip a rare Ferrari down to its gold-plated parts. The class resentment is real, pointed, and never disguised as anything else. It is the most sincere thing Ratner has ever put on screen, which may say more about Ratner than about the film.

The ensemble is notably diverse for a studio caper of this vintage. Eddie Murphy, Michael Peña, Gabourey Sidibe, and Stephen McKinley Henderson share the frame with Ben Stiller and Casey Affleck, and the casting plays as ordinary rather than as a statement. Sidibe's Jamaican maid faces deportation, a detail that gestures at immigrant precarity without examining it. Téa Leoni's FBI agent is competent and drunk in roughly equal measure, and Nina Arianda's receptionist turns out to be a lawyer. These women drive the plot. The film simply has no interest in saying so out loud.

That reticence defines the whole enterprise. The anti-rich messaging arrives through farce, not sermon, which keeps the temperature low. There is no queer presence, no environmental conscience, no commentary on bodies, no neurodivergent character, and no attempt to rewrite the historical record. What remains is a competent heist comedy with an unusually sharp grudge and an unusually soft follow-through. We have seen this grudge before, and we will see it again, usually with better jokes.