Heist

• Title: Tower Heist
• IMDB: link

There’s a long and storied tradition of heist films in cinema, and no small number of those films are draped in a dyed-in-the-wool “fuck the man” ethos. Of late, we’ve had far less anti-establishment peanut butter in our heist-film chocolate, but if there’s any time for populist payback on our silver screens, I think we can all agree that now’s as ripe a time as any.

But whereas the sadly overreaching In Time sci-fi inequality underpinnings felt like a happy accident in the midst of an otherwise unfortunate trainwreck, Brett Ratner‘s latest assault on cinema, Tower Heist, wears its blue-collar leanings on its sleeve like the world’s least subtle Livestrong bracelet. If only as much thought had gone into the pacing (and plot) of this little-guys-strike-back farce as it did for how to stuff as much working-stiff sympathy into 104 minutes, we might have had ourselves an entertaining little bout of payback by proxy.

Unfortunately, Ratner (who I hold could not have destroyed the X-Men franchise more completely than if he made Jar-Jar Dark Phoenix) seemed to take an obvious love of 70’s heist films with one serious Xanax chaser.

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