Arts & Entertainment

This Week at the Movies

'Tower Heist' steals a few laughs, but stoner comedy 'Harold and Kumar' is a bad trip.

It’s been a mostly dreary year for Hollywood comedies - “Bridesmaids” excluded –and this week’s two wide releases are no exception.

Brett Ratner’s “Tower Heist” is an occasionally amusing, but mostly formulaic, heist movie that emulates the setup of an “Ocean’s 11” film, but replaces that series’ suave characters with comedians.

In the film, Josh Kovacs (Ben Stiller) is the dedicated manager of a high-rise building known as The Tower. The penthouse is inhabited by Arthur Shaw (Alan Alda), a smarmy Wall Street bigwig who, as it turns out, is at the center of a major financial scandal.

Find out what's happening in Bayside-Douglastonwith free, real-time updates from Patch.

The building’s employees find out that their pensions and investments are tied up in Shaw’s Ponzi scheme and that they will likely be left with nothing.

Kovacs and a motley crew of workers played by Matthew Broderick, Casey Affleck, Michael Pena and Gabourey Sibide decide to rob Shaw’s penthouse, where Kovacs is convinced a secret stash of $20 million is hidden. The group enlists the help of a thief (Eddie Murphy), who schools them in the art of the heist.

Find out what's happening in Bayside-Douglastonwith free, real-time updates from Patch.

The picture has its moments, mostly thanks to Murphy, who has apparently turned his back on kiddie movies to return to the edgier characters he played earlier in his career.

But “Tower Heist” is pretty standard pre-holiday Hollywood fare - a broad comedy with a time-honored formula that is populated with a range of personalities.

The movie is good for a few laughs, but that’s about it.

And yet, that’s more than I can say for “A Very Harold and Kumar 3D Christmas,” a mercifully short third installment in a comedy franchise that ran out of steam long ago.

In this sequel, stoners Harold (John Cho) and Kumar (Kal Penn) have grown apart. The former is unsettled by the prospect of entertaining his wife’s overbearing father (Danny Trejo) for Christmas, while the latter finds out that his ex-girlfriend is pregnant with his child.

So, yes, adulthood squeaks its way into the series – that is, after 90 minutes of unrepentant juvenilia that includes an infant who is exposed to pot, cocaine and ecstasy, flying baby poo, a graphic throat slitting courtesy of a Russian mobster, naked nuns, Jesus Christ as a lothario, Santa Claus being shot (ho, ho, ho) and Neil Patrick Harris, who reprises his role as himself, but as a misogynist who pretends to be gay in order to seduce women.

The film’s incorporation of 3D technology nearly works as a parody of Hollywood unnecessarily adding another dimension to movies that hardly qualify for being seen in 2D. But, unfortunately, “Harold and Kumar” is also one of those movies.

I’d recommend that you just say no.


Get more local news delivered straight to your inbox. Sign up for free Patch newsletters and alerts.

We’ve removed the ability to reply as we work to make improvements. Learn more here

More from Bayside-Douglaston