Comic Capers to Botched Robberies

This weekend, Ben Stiller and Eddie Murphy star in "Tower Heist," a comedy caper on par with "Oceans 11" or "The Italian Job." Seeking revenge on a a Wall Street swindler, a group of luxury condominium workers plot the ultimate revenge. The evil broker has stolen their life savings, and the only way to get it back is a heist of monumental proportions.

Seems perfect for the disillusioned "Occupy Wall Street" group, eh?

To be brief, this movie is not the first of it's kind. "Tower Heist" has been receiving decent reviews, but mostly just because this formula is hard to mess up. I'm sure you can think of a film that gathers of group of "specialists" in order to take down some corrupt official. It has been done, and it has been done well (the two I mentioned in the opening paragraph are great examples). The formula is a crowd-pleaser, and this seems the perfect thing to appeal to audiences. However, the best examples of the formula are those that subvert it, changing something about it to keep it fresh. The classic I will discuss does just that.

This week, I am stretching all the way back to 1992.

Heists make for good cinema, so I'm keeping that. However, the whole "friendship" thing needs to go (man, that sounds cruel). I want to pit my heist members against each other, and grow their suspicions to a boiling point.

This week, it's one of my favorites: "Reservoir Dogs."

"Reservoir Dogs" looks at what happens before and after (but not during) a botched jewelry robbery. We meet the players before the film begins, all given cryptic code names. Mr. White is a career criminal who tried to put his storied past behind him. He shares the bulk of the film with the young and rebellious Mr. Orange, a fellow criminal who was shot during the robbery. One of them is bleeding to death, but they have the diamonds. However, no one else is showing up to the meeting spot.

Mr. Pink, the weaselly loner of the group, stumbles in and states there is a traitor among them. Behind him is Mr. Blonde, a terrifying sadist who went nuts during the heist. Their fifth cohort, Mr. Blue, is missing in action. The color-men wait and deliberate, eventually joined by their bosses. By exploring the past and the present, the criminals work to oust the rat among them.

This movie launched the career of Quentin Tarantino, the auteur director who gave us "Kill Bill," "Pulp Fiction" and "Inglorious Basterds." In other words, you can expect a lot of timeline jumps and sudden cuts. That, and violence. Lots of violence. "Reservoir Dogs," though, is probably the purest movie to encapsulate his style. This movie is tense and confusing all at once, and that makes it all the more fun to analyze and deconstruct. Once all the pieces are on the board, everything falls into place.

The Final Stretch:
I like this kind of movie. The "band together for a greater cause" mantra is something I find interesting, and I can watch these movies all the time. "Tower Heist" takes the formula into comedy, and that is a valid choice. Watching colorful characters bounce off each other in light comedy is a great time. However, I love "Reservoir Dogs" because it shows how these heists actually are. To place comedy in these instances is a pretty big stretch. They are fun, but reality can be strikingly powerful. After all, real heists are between terrible people, criminals normally colored a bloody crimson.