#Tower heist review ebert series

Two men posing as police officers entered the building, tied up the security guards, and spent the next 81 minutes (a long time for any sort of robbery, perhaps indicating a. On March 18 th, 1990, a small but beautiful building in Boston called the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum was robbed. The opening shot lets the audience know that they are going to be in the head of Rebeca Huntt and it is a whirlwind. This is a Robbery: The Worlds Biggest Art Heist. Instead, he just takes a quick trip to a country house.Īs McCall returns refreshed to singlehandedly overturn an oligopoly, a film that had started by engaging with issues of ageing and loss has forgotten such petty concerns entirely. Rebeca Huntt 's 'Beba' is the coming-of-age story that Black American children have been waiting for, a documentary that encompasses every step of reclamation of an American bloodline. He's so convincing at being tougher than everyone else that we never get that end-of-the-second-act moment where it looks as if everything is lost. But Denzel's strength is also his weakness. Denzel is so cool, so made of pure nails he can make even the most preposterous action scene feel thrilling. Secondly, there's the even older chestnut of how the audience suspends disbelief as the toughest (and most tooled-up) killers east of the Danube get laced by a man who can remember the moon landings.įortunately for Fuqua, this ain't just any old 59-year-old.

#Tower heist review ebert series

Firstly, there's the desensitisation-to-violence chestnut as Teddy (a just about convincing Marton Csokas) starts popping people with ever more lurid brutality. The Equalizer is a remake of the 80s TV series that starred Edward Woodward as a sort of refined Charles Bronson, taking out street scum with a Walther PPK and a stiff upper lip. There are two problems with this turn of events. Soon enough dozens of people are being blown up, shot dead and having their testicles shoved in their mouths. The organisation is headed by a man called Pushkin who sends his enforcer, Teddy, to tie things up. The pimps are, naturally, the lowest orders of a massive Russian crime syndicate who trade in everything from people to oil. Then McCall heads to a well-appointed private bar and takes out Lena's assailants in all of 28 seconds, putting a corkscrew to effective use in the process, and things go entirely to pot.