There is a new trailer out for the Ben Stiller/Eddie Murphy comedy Tower Heist. The comedy, directed by Brett Ratner, stars Ben Stiller as the manager of a large New York City apartment building who, along with all of his employees, loses his pension when it is stolen by a Bernie Madoff-esque Wall Street criminal named Arthur Shaw played by Alan Alda.
The comedy kicks in when Stiller and his employees, including Casey Affleck, Michael Pena, Gabourey Sidibe and a defrauded tenant played by Matthew Broderick conspire to steal the money from Arthur Shaw’s massive top floor apartment. Having zero criminal experience among them, Stiller turns to a childhood aquaintance named Slide (Eddie Murphy) who has a criminal past.
The first trailer for Tower Heist, released back in July, established the premise and a broad comic tone. The new trailer is basically a variation on the original that adds only more of Casey Affleck being skeptical of the heist idea and loses a flirtatious scene between Gabourey Sidibe and Eddie Murphy.
The new trailer also responds to a Twitter campaign by actor Greg Grunberg. Grunberg was upset that the original trailer made jokes about Stiller’s character suffering from epilepsy as a child. In the original trailer, Murphy is seen doing an elaborate and broad piece on Stiller’s alleged affliction, including referring to Stiller as ‘little seizure boy.’
Director Brett Ratner apologized for the original trailer but it was never pulled from Youtube or the Tower Heist website. Only now has the trailer been replaced with this new trailer which removes the reference to epilepsy but keeps much of Murphy’s elaborate comic description of Stiller frothing at the mouth, only in a slightly different context and it loses the line ‘little seizure boy.’
Check it out below and let us know what you think.
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