’30 Minutes or Less’ Review: Fun cast strapped to a bomb

Rating: R for crude and sexual content, pervasive language, nudity and some violence Written by: Michael Delibirti Directed by: Ruben Fleischer Starring: Jesse Eisenberg, Aziz Ansari, Danny McBride, Nick Swardson, Fred Ward, Michael Pena

PCN Rating:

Ruben Fleischer’s low-brow action comedy 30 Minutes or Less is a pretty big comedown from his entertaining and witty Zombieland. Stranding Jesse Eisenberg (fresh off his Oscar win) in a dopey one-note premise, 30 Minutes takes just about that long to wear out its welcome. The cast, also including Aziz Ansari, Danny McBride, Nick Swardson and a gruff and grumpy Fred Ward, is game for whatever, but the script by Michael Diliberti lets them down. Fleischer’s direction is also disappointingly pedestrian and uneven. This doesn’t feel so much like a high profile summer comedy as it does one of those nondescript and addled second tier time-wasters that used to play Comedy Central in the 90s. Stick this on a shelf somewhere next to 8 Heads in a Duffle Bag and Airheads.

It isn’t that 30 Minutes or Less is exactly terrible. It’s more that it’s simply too slight and confused to maintain any sense of charm or mirth, and in the absence of a plan, much like the bungling, loathsome robbers who strap a bomb to Eisenberg’s pizza delivery guy, it flails around wildly leaving a swath of destruction. What really harms the endeavor is that it can’t ever commit; is it a dark comedy or a buddy action flick? The chase sequences and rather graphic violence aren’t particularly exciting, and there’s no edge or insight to the humor. Instead, it comes off as terribly mean spirited, and the overrated McBride makes his character far more loathsome than the movie can support.

Minutes begins as if it were a Richard Linklater slacker comedy and quickly picks up a Judd Apatow filthy buddy verve. You see, Nick (Eisenberg) is just wasting his time in his hometown of Grand Rapids, Michigan, schlepping pizzas while his erratic bud, Chet, a first-time school teacher, berates him for pursuing Chet’s twin sister, the lovely Kate (Dilshad Vadsaria).  Enter the would-be criminal duo of Dwayne (Danny McBride) and Travis (Nick Swardson), who accost Nick and outfit him with a homemade bomb so that he’ll rob a bank for them.

Dwayne and Travis are no-accounts who are tired of living in the overbearing shadow of Dwayne’s dad (Fred Ward) and want to put a hit out on the old man, so they can inherit his money. In what amounts to one of the most convoluted plans in recent memory, they are sending in Nic with the bomb so they can use the stolen cash to pay the ghetto fabulous hit-man Chango (Michael Pena) to kill Ward. There’s not enough suspension of disbelief available to accept that even dolts like Dwayne and Travis would attempt to go through with this. Once Nick finds himself in the sticky situation, he recruits Chet to help him go through with the robbery. Disaster ensues.

Because of the amiable banter between Eisenberg and Ansari, the opening chapters of 30 Minutes are mildly amusing. It’s when the claptrap involving the bomb shows up that the  film starts sinking in the mire of soured ambition. Bodies are set on fire, people are brutally killed, McBride mutters his way through a completely irritating role, and the low-brow raunch is juvenile without being funny. Eisenberg seems uncertain of what he’s supposed to be doing; he’s not creating a character like in Network, and he’s dialed his own nebbish energy way down from the more frantic but assured Zombieland. Ansari isn’t doing anything much different than he’s done before; if you’ve seen his schtick on Parks and Rec, then you’ve seen everything he’s got to offer here. Ward is just cashing a paycheck, Vadsaria is barely an afterthought, and Swardson is lost in McBride’s sleazy orbit. Only Michael Pena, who should get an award for consistently strong supporting work, manages to make Chango the  assassin truly zany and interesting.  As he did in previous pics like Battle Los Angeles and Everything Must Go, Pena settles for the scraps of the narrative, while increasing the value of the film exponentially with his presence.

There’s not much to be saved though in 30 Minutes or Less. Strange to see Fleischer turn down bigger and more high-profile offers, only to settle for this lightweight and wrong-headed misfire. Here, he lacks the confidence he demonstrated in Zombieland, and although there’s plenty of unpleasant and sudden violence, nothing comes close to matching the gut shot that Bill Murray took in that film. Jess Armstrong’s cinematography is best described as flat, and Fleischer’s staging of the action scenes is curiously disinterested.

The script, obviously based upon the unlikely story of Pennsylvanian pizza guy Brian Wells (who blew himself up with a bomb he thought was fake), is the real culprit here because it fails to make any of the characters likable. It’s down to the director and his cast though, all of them capable of adding zest, and all of them failing to invest urgency or thrills into the scenario. 30 Minutes or Less just sits there, drawing sporadic chuckles, and pretty soon we realize that about 60 extra minutes have been ripped away without explanation.