Rated R for crude and sexual content, pervasive language, nudity and some violence
Cast: Jesse Eisenberg, Danny McBride, Aziz Ansari, Nick Swardson, Dilshad Vadsaria, Michael Pena
Director: Ruben Fleischer
"30 Minutes or Less" is an 83-minute crime caper comedy with just enough enjoyable footage to make a two minute trailer. This is the kind of film that seems destined to take up space in a DVD rental kiosk awaiting the procurement of someone with little to do on a Saturday night.
Sad, considering the talent involved. The director is Ruben Fleischer, who scored big with the surprise hit "Zombieland." The cast includes Jesse Eisenberg, fresh off his Oscar-nominated turn in "The Social Network" (as well as the aforementioned "Zombieland") and up-and-coming funnyman Aziz Ansari (NBC's "Parks and Recreation"). An impressive lot, but all are at the mercy of a screenplay that redefines everything you thought you knew about indolence. The script feels worked under a two hour deadline and the writers had just run out of weed.
The story is set in Grand Rapids, Michigan and involves two sets of goofballs, one pairing less moronic than the other. Nick (Jesse Eisenberg) is an often-stoned though somewhat likable twenty-something who is seemingly content in his life as a pizza delivery driver. His nights are spent in the company of his only friend, a schoolteacher named Chet (Aziz Ansari). They spend their evenings glued to a six-pack while re-watching all manner of action cinema. ("Die Hard" and "Point Break" among them.)
The more moronic duo are Dwayne (Danny McBride) and his best buddy, Travis (Nick Swardson). They take pride in being the most hapless of losers. Dwayne's verbally abusive father (Fred Ward) is a former marine who won millions on a lottery ticket but refuses to share with his lazy offspring. The nitwits' only real aspiration in life is to open a tanning salon that offers happy endings, and they devise a plan to hire a hit man (Michael Pena) to kill dad and inherit the dough. Ah, but an assassin requires money, so the boys conjure up another plan... one that involves kidnapping some poor sap, strapping a bomb to his chest and ordering him to rob a bank within ten hours or BOOM! What better target than a pizza delivery boy? (One could ask why not skip the hit man and simply keep the money accrued from the bank heist, but I suppose that would have eliminated a subplot and made the movie even shorter.)
The film has an acceptable enough pace (the truncated running time helps), and director Fleischer wisely stages the action scenes as though he were piecing together a Wile E. Coyote cartoon. (A smart move. The idea of a bomb strapped to a man's chest is a bit unsettling so if you're going to play it up for laughs, best to stay clear of any semblance of plausibility.) The problem isn't with the direction; it's with a screenplay noticeably devoid of wit. Had it possessed even the slightest hint of a dry or satiric angle, it could have amounted to something. Instead, the characters are reduced to trading f-bombs instead of jokes. Profanity doesn't offend me, but expletives alone don't equal humor. (Only David Mamet has elevated their usage to an art form.) I guess we're expected to laugh out loud at every utterance of the word fuck. Or maybe the screenwriters didn't expect anything from the viewer. Who knows.
The cast does what they can, but the weakness of the script forces them to do too much. Eisenberg and Ansari come off the best, if only because their banter doesn't wear quite as thin as that of McBride and Swardson. I'm not a viewer of HBO's "Eastbound and Down" so I admit that all I have to go on is his movie roles, but Danny McBride seems more and more like a one-shtick-pony, and I'm growing tired of the shtick. If I were to toss a little career advice his way, I'd say the next time someone approaches him with a role he'd be ideal for, run away as fast as you can. I've seen Nick Swardson in a couple movies now. I have nothing against him, but he doesn't seem above Chris Kattan level at this point. With due respect to Kattan, that's not really a compliment coming from me.
I don't blame Fleischer for this comic swing-and-miss. That he even manages to keep the movie afloat is a testament to his filmmaking skill. I doubt he's a one-hit-wonder, but he needs to wait for a much better script to come along or write one himself. Having a film like this on your resume isn't going to wow anyone. The trailer for the movie promised something a lot more fun than what was delivered. Maybe that explains the shortened length... the editors wanted to cut out the things that didn't work only to realize that doing so would leave everything but the trailer on the cutting room floor.
NOTE: I opted not to include reference to the horrific Brian Douglas Wells collar-bomb case that the film's premise is strikingly similar to in my original review, as I wanted to focus more on the movie itself. Screenwriters Michael Diliberti and Matthew Sullivan flatly deny that their idea was in any way inspired by the aforementioned event.
* * out of * * * * stars
Sad, considering the talent involved. The director is Ruben Fleischer, who scored big with the surprise hit "Zombieland." The cast includes Jesse Eisenberg, fresh off his Oscar-nominated turn in "The Social Network" (as well as the aforementioned "Zombieland") and up-and-coming funnyman Aziz Ansari (NBC's "Parks and Recreation"). An impressive lot, but all are at the mercy of a screenplay that redefines everything you thought you knew about indolence. The script feels worked under a two hour deadline and the writers had just run out of weed.
The story is set in Grand Rapids, Michigan and involves two sets of goofballs, one pairing less moronic than the other. Nick (Jesse Eisenberg) is an often-stoned though somewhat likable twenty-something who is seemingly content in his life as a pizza delivery driver. His nights are spent in the company of his only friend, a schoolteacher named Chet (Aziz Ansari). They spend their evenings glued to a six-pack while re-watching all manner of action cinema. ("Die Hard" and "Point Break" among them.)
The more moronic duo are Dwayne (Danny McBride) and his best buddy, Travis (Nick Swardson). They take pride in being the most hapless of losers. Dwayne's verbally abusive father (Fred Ward) is a former marine who won millions on a lottery ticket but refuses to share with his lazy offspring. The nitwits' only real aspiration in life is to open a tanning salon that offers happy endings, and they devise a plan to hire a hit man (Michael Pena) to kill dad and inherit the dough. Ah, but an assassin requires money, so the boys conjure up another plan... one that involves kidnapping some poor sap, strapping a bomb to his chest and ordering him to rob a bank within ten hours or BOOM! What better target than a pizza delivery boy? (One could ask why not skip the hit man and simply keep the money accrued from the bank heist, but I suppose that would have eliminated a subplot and made the movie even shorter.)
The film has an acceptable enough pace (the truncated running time helps), and director Fleischer wisely stages the action scenes as though he were piecing together a Wile E. Coyote cartoon. (A smart move. The idea of a bomb strapped to a man's chest is a bit unsettling so if you're going to play it up for laughs, best to stay clear of any semblance of plausibility.) The problem isn't with the direction; it's with a screenplay noticeably devoid of wit. Had it possessed even the slightest hint of a dry or satiric angle, it could have amounted to something. Instead, the characters are reduced to trading f-bombs instead of jokes. Profanity doesn't offend me, but expletives alone don't equal humor. (Only David Mamet has elevated their usage to an art form.) I guess we're expected to laugh out loud at every utterance of the word fuck. Or maybe the screenwriters didn't expect anything from the viewer. Who knows.
The cast does what they can, but the weakness of the script forces them to do too much. Eisenberg and Ansari come off the best, if only because their banter doesn't wear quite as thin as that of McBride and Swardson. I'm not a viewer of HBO's "Eastbound and Down" so I admit that all I have to go on is his movie roles, but Danny McBride seems more and more like a one-shtick-pony, and I'm growing tired of the shtick. If I were to toss a little career advice his way, I'd say the next time someone approaches him with a role he'd be ideal for, run away as fast as you can. I've seen Nick Swardson in a couple movies now. I have nothing against him, but he doesn't seem above Chris Kattan level at this point. With due respect to Kattan, that's not really a compliment coming from me.
I don't blame Fleischer for this comic swing-and-miss. That he even manages to keep the movie afloat is a testament to his filmmaking skill. I doubt he's a one-hit-wonder, but he needs to wait for a much better script to come along or write one himself. Having a film like this on your resume isn't going to wow anyone. The trailer for the movie promised something a lot more fun than what was delivered. Maybe that explains the shortened length... the editors wanted to cut out the things that didn't work only to realize that doing so would leave everything but the trailer on the cutting room floor.
NOTE: I opted not to include reference to the horrific Brian Douglas Wells collar-bomb case that the film's premise is strikingly similar to in my original review, as I wanted to focus more on the movie itself. Screenwriters Michael Diliberti and Matthew Sullivan flatly deny that their idea was in any way inspired by the aforementioned event.
* * out of * * * * stars
