Here is a list of working titles for Tower Heist, a new action comedy starring Ben Stiller, Eddie Murphy, the ghost of Bernie Madoff, and the Trump International Hotel and Tower. Hollywood Thinks You’re Stupid. Amateur Hour, or, Who Cares About a Plausible Plot When You Can Make Lesbian Jokes??? How To Keep Aging Male Comedians Relevant Without Forcing Them To Work Too Hard.

A salt-and-peppery Stiller is Josh Kovacs, an Astoria boy who’s worked his way up to the manager’s position at The Tower, the most exclusive apartment building in Manhattan. He fetches fancy cheese, he protects cheating husbands from wives who come home early, and he plays online chess with Albert Shaw (Alan Alda), Bernie Madoff’s doppelganger and The Tower’s richest resident. Unsurprisingly, Shaw turns out to be a Ponzi-scheming crook. He’s arrested, released on a $10 million bail, and confined to his swanky penthouse (hopefully this is all sounding familiar).

Everyone who invested with Shaw is up a creek without a paddle, and that includes all The Tower employees. Kovacs had asked Shaw to take on everyone’s retirement portfolios some months ago, and Lester, the doorman, went so far as to fork over his life savings on the promise of triple returns. Now, everything is gone— except, Kovacs learns— a cool $20 million in cash Shaw supposedly has stashed somewhere in his apartment. He hatches a plan to steal the money, and that’s where Eddie Murphy comes in to make a bunch of jokes about epilepsy and show these white boy amateurs how to break and enter. Except he’s not that great at breaking and entering.

In fact, everyone is fairly terrible at their respective jobs in this movie, including Téa Leoni’s Worst FBI Agent of All Time. This character (and the rest of her “crack team”) makes our federal investigative force look exponentially more incompetent, unprofessional, and ridiculous than the time Mulder and Scully investigated a freak show and exhumed a potato. David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson also have about a zillion times more chemistry than Stiller and Leoni, but luckily, it doesn’t matter. Tepidness is a theme: when Stiller, fired up about the loss of everyone’s money, bashes in the windows of the prized Ferrari Shaw has parked in his living room, it’s just about most lackadaisical, uninspired act of vandalism in history.

I did laugh at a few parts, because anyone who’s lived in New York for more than a year is guilty of a few twisted fantasies about crashing through the police barricade at the Thanksgiving Day Parade, bouncing tourists and overly spirited baton-twirlers off the hood of the car like beach balls. And as someone who is also afraid of heights, several scenes made me wince. But the script is too long, the dialogue is clunky, and almost every single plot point is either too obvious or too much of a stretch, even for Hollywood Fantasyland. Of course the Jamaican housekeeper (played by Gabourey Sidibe) is also an expert safe cracker. If you leave your wallets on a table in the care of a thief, of course he’s going to steal your cash. And so on. The dots of plausibility never connect, relying too heavily on our suspension of disbelief and the fact that these FBI agents have clearly just graduated from criminology kindergarten. The good guys triumph, but the pleasure of outsmarting a worthy foe isn’t earned.

The numerous outright factual errors—a car made out of solid gold would weigh a whole lot more than the 2,000 pounds Matthew Broderick’s former Merill Lynch trader character claims, for example—are so careless they seem deliberate. Perhaps it’s a dummy trail to throw off any real life proles looking to plan their own Robin Hood-style heist or play a high-stakes game of chess. Regardless, the egregious pandering to the 99 percent is maddening. It’s a vicarious revenge scenario for the proletariat rabble. Sure, it might be a fun to ride along while very, very rich movie stars pretend to defeat the other very rich movie stars masquerading as Wall Street fat cats, but a feel-good Brett Ratner ending doesn’t do anything for the real people who’ve lost everything.