Tower Heist is deeply painful to watch, and its awfulness slimes you for days afterward, as you desperately try to expunge the memory of what you have seen and heard. It is so awful that for weeks I could not bring myself to review it (or anything else for that matter,) and my wife and I decided to declare a temporary theater-movie moratorium to recover. We even considered stopping going out to movies altogether, such was the depths of our depression and disillusionment. Tower Heist is the kind of movie that shakes your faith in the art itself.

Ben Stiller is the most unfunny comedian of all time (tied for first with Adam Sandler) and on top of that he is a horrifically bad actor. Eddie Murphy has not been funny since the 1980’s. I’m not sure he was ever funny, now that I think of it. Matthew Broderick ranks in the the top ten of completely unfunny comedians. Put the three together and it’s like having your toenails pulled out. The Precious girl should have just retired if this is all she can get – I guess for her it’s either shit like this or “fat porn,” and I couldn’t tell you which has less dignity. Casey Affleck must be thinking to himself “did Gone Baby Gone ever really happen? How could everything go so wrong?” And WTF are Alan Alda and Judd Hirsch doing in this film? All these people must be desperate for money, there’s no other explanation.

It doesn’t matter that this film purports to have a populist message because the film is so shamefully idiotic and offensive that it negates anything the story might think it’s trying to do. In fact, I liked Alan Alda’s character (the prick they are robbing) more than any of the rest of them – every time he was in a scene with any of these dorks I found myself rooting for him. Talk about a script backfiring! Even when he is being completely evil you still like him more than them because he’s the only one who can act. My wife confessed that during the dangling car scene she was wishing the line would snap and all the robbers would all plunge to their deaths (and thus ending the movie, hopefully.) Oh yeah, and I hated that fucking doorman guy. He should have jumped in front of the train.

But you know what the worst part is? The packed audience of the Union Square 14 theater was LAUGHING! My wife and I were like “what the fuck are these people laughing at?” Not only is film comedy completely dead, but no one even has the vaguest memory what film comedy is supposed to be. So, in one scene the fat girl bursts in wielding a gun while she is cramming a piece of cake into her mouth – everybody laughed. Is this what watching current-day television and playing video games has done to people’s brains?

Instead of watching this movie, I recommend the following: watch the trailer, and then  close your eyes and make up what happens in the movie out of your imagination. Trust me, it will be a much more enjoyable and rewarding experience