Director Brett Ratner says when he set out to erect Tower Heist, his new caper-adventure starring Eddie Murphy, he wanted to emulate the kind of action comedies he had loved as a kid - the kind of movies that might have starred Eddie Murphy.
"Eddie kind of invented the genre," Ratner said, referring to 48 HRS and the Beverly Hills Cop series - films that sandwiched Murphy's early, breakthrough years on Saturday Night Live and as a stand-up comedian.
"Rush Hour, which was part of my success, wouldn't have existed if it weren't for Eddie," Ratner said. "I grew up studying movies like this and Eddie did it better than anybody."
Murphy (50) has had a few dry seasons. Apart from the Shrek franchise, in which he voices Donkey, the star hasn't had anything close to a hit since Norbit (2007). Meet Dave (2008) crashed and burned; likewise Imagine That (2009), even if his performance seemed grossly underrated.
So both he and Ratner (42) have to be hoping that Tower Heist, in which the disgruntled employees of a luxury Manhattan condominium rip off a Bernie Madoff-inspired con-man, bails them both out. The box office on Ratner's last theatrical feature, Rush Hour 3, indicates that the franchise is exhausted; Murphy could certainly use a hit.
It was Murphy's idea that eventually became the script for Tower Heist, and which has suddenly become a topical movie, one that reflects current events. When he's fired for an act of supreme insubordination, condo manager Josh Kovacs (Ben Stiller) assembles a misfit crew of would-be burglars - including the street-wise and none too trustworthy Slide (Murphy) - to rob the apartment of Arthur Shaw (Alan Alda), an unscrupulous banker who has embezzled the retirement fund of the building's entire workforce. The situations are largely absurd; the premise unlikely. But the idea that someone could pull off what Shaw pulls off isn't exactly science fiction.
At a press event at the Mandarin Oriental hotel, just across from the movie's principal location, Trump Tower, Murphy declined to take credit for being anything close to prescient.
"That part wasn't my core idea," he said. "It was about a bunch of disgruntled employees trying to rip off the building they worked in. All that other stuff came later."
It wasn't their objective to reflect the Occupy Wall Street movement, or the Madoff case, either, Ratner said.
"We wanted to make a great underdog story," the director said. "We didn't know that the culture was going to catch up to it.
"It's nice to make a movie that says something," he added. "But, in the end, I'm happy to have made a movie that's fun and has characters you can root for."
Those characters include the other employees, such as Cole, played by Casey Affleck; Odessa, played by Gabourey Sidibe (Precious); and Lester the doorman, played by Broadway vet Stephen McKinley Henderson. There's also FBI agent Claire Denham (Tea Leoni) and a ruined broker named Chase Fitzhugh (Matthew Broderick).
"We kind of came to town at the same time, at the same age," Murphy said of himself and Broderick. "I was joking that, eventually, we'll be able to watch ourselves disintegrate on screen." But not any time soon.
"We wanted to make something grounded in reality," said Ratner, who re-created six blocks of the Thanksgiving Day parade (to accompany his footage of the real parade), and built a four-storey replica of the Trump building out of which he could hang cast members and a car that figures so prominently in the plot, without endangering dog-walkers on Central Park West.
"There are two kinds of heist movies," he said. "There's the dramatic movie like The Heist, or whatever, and there's the caper film, which meant in the past a broader type of movie, where you're not really invested. I wanted something very real and very grounded."
Back when they were making 48 HRS, Murphy said, director Walter Hill gave him a piece of advice. Namely, "This is not a comedy." Ratner said his movie reflects the same attitude.
"The comedy comes from the characters and the situations they're in," he said. "We didn't hire a bunch of comedians to be in this movie. We hired the best actors for these characters."
Eddie Murphy in action
Eddie Murphy's personae range from the outrageously comedic - Donkey in Shrek - to the more nuanced and complex: His Oscar-nominated role in Dreamgirls - James "Thunder" Early - revealed what observers had long known, that Murphy could hold his own with anyone (and that great comedians are great actors). However: There's an entire substratum of Eddie Murphy as action hero.
• 48 HRS (1982): Murphy made one of the great movie debuts as hustler and convict Reggie Hammond, who could only be trusted as far as you could throw him but was lovably felonious all the same.
• BEVERLY HILLS COP (1984): In what would turn into a hugely successful franchise, Murphy starred as rule-breaking Detroit detective Axel Foley, who heads for Beverly Hills to solve the murder of his best friend.
• VAMPIRE IN BROOKLYN (1995): Largely forgotten pairing of Murphy with horror maestro Wes Craven, about a Caribbean vampire on the prowl in Brooklyn, looking for Angela Bassett. Murphy wrote the script with his brother, Charles, and stepbrother Vernon Lynch and played multiple roles, including an alcoholic preacher and an Italian gangster.
