Review: "Uncut Gems"

“Uncut Gems” is a 135-minute exercise in anxiety and unpleasantness. It begins with a colonoscopy, and things go downhill from there.

Adam Sandler, the doofus funnyman who makes unambitious comedies for kids and adolescents and occasionally tackles serious roles in films like “Punch Drunk Love,” kvetches and whines and shouts and connives as Harold Ratner, a Manhattan gem dealer. He’s a jerk, a coward, a philanderer, a compulsive gambler, inept businessman, a lousy husband and father and not even a particularly good boyfriend.

It’s fine to have an unlikable person as your main character in movie. But he’s got to go somewhere. He needs to start low and go high or high to low or even just side to side. Howard starts out as a putz driven by his compulsions and ends the movie the exact same way.

“Gems” is directed and written (along with Ronald Bronstein) by brothers Benny Safdie and Josh Safdie. A couple of years ago they made “Good Time,” beloved by many but not me. It felt like one long pointless chase, and this new film bears a striking resemblance.

Harold, who wears rectangular glasses that give him a sinister beetle look, is seemingly successful but is always teetering on the edge of total chaos. He owns his own jewelry shop, the kind where you have to be buzzed in through a bulletproof glass chamber. He has a big house on Long Island, a Mercedes, a nice apartment in the city, and his wife (Idina Menzel) and two sons want for nothing.

But Harold owes money all over town -- for gambling debts, for pawned watches or rings, and so on. He has debts on his debts. He’ll use the money from one loan to pay off another, and the wise guys are constantly threatening to break off a piece of him.

Julia Fox plays Julia, who works in Harold’s store and is also his mistress. He’s her sugar daddy, paying for a swank apartment and supporting her partying, while simultaneously complaining she only shows up at work when she wants to. Julia also appears to be running some kind of operation of her own on the side, which involves cozying up to an up-and-coming R&B crooner, The Weeknd (playing himself).

Julia is one of those female characters who only exist in the movies. She’s young and gorgeous and crafty, and why she hangs around with an unstable loser like Harold is never even hinted at. They undergo a seemingly regular cycle of fights, breakups and reconciliations.

The main storyline centers around a black opal Harold spent months obtaining on the sly from an Ethiopian mine. It’s basically a hunk of rock with a number of rainbow-colored gems embedded. He claims it’s worth more than a million bucks, and selling it will solve all his problems.

It won’t. Harold is not the sort of guy whom problems seem to find; he actively goes in search of them.

One day Kevin Garnett walks into his shop. To show off, Harold dazzles the NBA star with the opal. But Demany (Lakeith Stanfield), the young black operator he hires to bring African-American celebrities and players into the store, convinces Harold to let Garnett borrow it for a day. (The story is set in 2012, when Garnett was still playing out the downside of his career.)

He has a monster game that night, and becomes convinced the opal is a good luck charm. There follows a cat-and-mouse game of Demany disappearing and Harold being unable to get the opal back. Meanwhile, he’s hocked stuff that doesn’t belong to him in order to place more bets on basketball games.

Circling around the edge of the story is Arnold (Eric Bogosian), one of the people Harold owes, who’s closer than most. Judd Hirsch plays Harold’s dad, unaware of how deep his son’s pathologies go. Keith Williams Richards is scary as hell as an icy-eyed goon stalking Harold.

“Uncut Gems” has boundless energy but no direction. Sandler is talking, talking, constantly talking, until it becomes a drone we wish would cease. You can hate your protagonist, but you’d better not be annoyed having him around.

Watching this movie is like winding up a kid’s toy that spins wildly in place, throwing off all sorts of crazy lights and sounds and colors. None of it really makes any sense, and then it stops.

Review: "Tower Heist"

The tower in “Tower Heist” is, literally, The Tower, a Trump Towers-esque palatial home to the Manhattan super-rich elite who live there and the small army of working-class stiffs who keep their pillows fluffed and the old ladies’ frou-frou dogs walked. The bad guy is a Bernie Madoff-style oligarch who gleefully steals from the rich and the not-so-rich alike, pocketing it all and depending on his money and connections to protect him from the Defarges of the world.

The heist part takes up the second half of the movie, as Ben Stiller leads a team of amateur thieves – and one professional, played by Eddie Murphy – into The Tower penthouse to reclaim their stolen pension money. It’s all about the righteous 99 percent thwarting the evil 1 percent.

It’s like Occupy Wall Street, rewritten as a goofy caper comedy.

I did not buy any of the characters in the movie as real people, and the mechanics of the actual heist doesn’t so much strain credulity as smash it into little pieces and stomp on it. At one point the film asks us to believe that hundreds of thousands of people attending the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade could be looking up into the air at all the floats, and not one of them notices something astonishing taking place at the top of The Tower.

Still, once the actual heist gets going, the movie revs up a decent amount of momentum and finds some sustainable laughs. It’s not quite enough to recommend it, but I’ll admit “Tower Heist” is a lot better than my exceedingly low expectations.

The first thing any potential ticket-buyer needs is to be disabused of the notion that this is a Stiller/Murphy buddy picture. Murphy plays Slide, who remains a fringe character until the 45-minute mark. He’s just some local loudmouth ex-con who shouts at neighbor Josh Kovacs (Stiller) whenever he walks by.

Later, after Josh is canned as the general manager of The Tower for standing up to top resident Arthur Shaw (Alan Alda), he invites Slide to join his crew of bumbling burglars. He reminds Slide they used to be nursery-school classmates, which Josh seems to think means they have a relationship, despite having no true interaction for 40 years.

The lack of any real Murphy/Stiller pairing is the biggest disappointment about “Tower Heist.” Both actors have been stuck in a rut of middlebrow comedies lately, so the idea of a couple of aging but still potent funnymen tag-teaming has a great deal of appeal.

Alas, they’re reduced to a few lame, sniping exchanges: “That’s it! I don’t want to talk to you for the rest of the robbery!”

Director Brett Ratner and screenwriters Ted Griffin and Jeff Nathanson never really kick the action out of tame screwball comedy territory, despite the daring Occupy overtones.

It’s too bad, considering the killer cast they assembled: in addition to Stiller, Murphy and Alda, there’s Casey Affleck, Matthew Broderick, Judd Hirsch, Michael Peña, Téa Leoni and Gabourey Sidibe. That’s five Academy Award nominees by my count – quite a lot of firepower considering the low-wattage material.

Affleck plays Josh’s dim brother-in-law; Peña is Dev’Reaux, the brash new elevator man; Sidibe is Odessa, a Jamaican maid with an outsize personality; Hirsch plays the unctuous Tower boss; and Leoni is the hard-wired FBI agent gunning for Shaw.

I particularly liked Broderick as Fitzhugh, a former Wall Street whiz turned unemployed evictee, who’s got an air of bottled-up middle-aged desperation just waiting to blow. Broderick has gray hair now, a couple of chins and a mid-life spread, but his boyish face still holds a hint of puckish Bueller charm.

Though held back by its sophomoric, self-imposed limitations, “Tower Heist” rises higher than it has any right to.

2.5 stars out of four