Tower Heist

More time-passing fluff from ‘Rush Hour’ maestro Brett Ratner, which puts a quality cast through their paces, alternates chuckles with spectacle and is pleasantly unpretentious with it. The tower in question overlooks New York’s Central Park and hosts serviced apartments where uniformed staff tend to super-wealthy residents – among them deliciously slippery Alan Alda as an investment kingpin whose arrest on fraud charges brings the shock that he’s lost the staff pension fund entrusted to him by likeably harrassed manager Ben Stiller. As the title suggests, the workers strike back not by pitching tents in the lobby but attempting to nab Alda’s stash from his penthouse pad. Hence there’s mild underdogs-on-a-mission japery, a clichéd assist from career-crook Eddie Murphy and a finale which might have been a bit more tense had we been able to take it remotely seriously. Still, that’s the price of unashamed escapism, and though it’s hard to get excited by this amiable potboiler, ‘Tower Heist’ is so at home with its limitations it’s equally hard to dislike.