30 Minutes or Less [Review by Haus]

30 Minutes or Less is ostensibly a comedy. It serves up a few funny scenes. But it’s a surprisingly cruel film as well, it seems cheap and empty, and it doesn’t deliver enough in the plot or laugh departments to make it worth the effort.

For those of you who care about this sort of thing, I’m going to take an unprecedented step here and just wholly endorse Parsi’s review. He nailed this picture. I agree with pretty much everything he says. (Except the vague insinuation that my interactions with my ICEE lack “chemistry.” Anyone who has seen me with an ICEE will tell you there’s no shortage of love. In either direction.) That said, I owe the Internet a review, and a review I shall provide.

The tale in brief: A washed-up and arrogant tough guy (Danny McBride) plots to kill his lotto-rich ex-Marine dad (Fred Ward) so he can inherit the winnings and date a stripper (Bianca Kajlich). McBride conscripts his half-wit buddy (Nick Swardson) as an accomplice and sets out to execute a supposedly foolproof plan: outsource a bank robbery, then use the cash to pay a hitman (Michael Pena). Our protagonist, a streetwise pizza guy played by Jesse Eisenberg, brings a pie to McBride’s place and awakes wearing a bomb vest. Get a hundred grand by dusk, he’s told, or you blow up. He in turn conscripts his own buddy (Aziz Ansari) to help out, and the unlikely duo goes off to … rob a bank.

Hilarity ought to have ensued. It’s a comedic take on the Speed model — escalation under threat of detonation. It could have been pretty good. But it’s not.

To his credit, Eisenberg makes a solid run at it — coming down off his Rain Man-esque turn as Mark Zuckerberg in the Social Network and giving this role more attention than it likely deserved. (Notwithstanding Zombieland I still think of him as the kid from Roger Dodger. Another aside: Zombieland and 30 Minutes or Less were both directed by Ruben Fleischer. Only one of them sucks.) Ansari delivers some good lines as Eisenberg’s buddy; both are suitably hyper-manic when necessary. But the mood fizzles whenever McBride appears. He plays it too straight — he’s all douche, no goof. His schtick might work in other circumstances — for instance, I can imagine him playing off a more sympathetic villain to good effect — but as a villain he’s on his own here. (Swardson is wasted as a sycophantic, blithering dummy who does little to defuse McBride’s meanness.)

30 Minutes or Less does very little with its premise, using it chiefly as a vehicle to parade various stereotypes on screen and to exploit its R-rating through strangely racially charged comments. I don’t consider myself over-sensitive in this regard, but between this and The Change Up I admit I’m a bit surprised by the current backslide into gratuitous race-remarks. I’d expect these from films several decades old, not 2011 releases. Sure, these comments are not ubiquitous, but they do crop up — and they seem to have been added, here, just for the sake of it. It’s more strange than anything else, but at the very least these quips squander screen time that could have been used on actual jokes.

The film also drags — I wished it really was 30 minutes or less — and is bogged down with uninteresting side characters (I’m looking at you, stripper and hitman.) But my main problem with it, again, is that the core material is mean and off-putting. Perhaps it’s the fact that this story actually happened (and the hapless dude got blown up), but I found myself strangely depressed by this movie. It’s not that it’s per se hard to make a comedy about unpleasant things — robbery, murder, extortion, and the like — but a certain lightness of heart helps. 30 Minutes or Less suffers from inconsistent levity.

I guess the moral here is sort of an inversion of Nick Lowe or Letters to Cleo — you gotta be kind to be cruel.

In all, 30 Minutes or Less isn’t worth your time. If you’ve seen the trailers you know the story — all you’re missing is a lot of unsettlingly mean behavior from the baddies and hamhanded scurrying from the buddies. It has its moments, but it’s been done better elsewhere.

HAUS VERDICT: In the market for an uneven, temperamental, mean little movie? Yeah, me neither. 

See what the other half thinks: Parsi’s view.