After a summer of blockbuster action and superhero movies, I wasn’t really expecting much out of ‘30 Minutes or Less.’ But I was pleasantly surprised by this unassuming little comedy hiding out in the end of the summer movie season.
The film tells the story of Nick (Jesse Eisenberg), a pizza delivery boy who is kidnapped by two fledgling criminals in gorilla masks (Danny McBride and Nick Swardson) who are looking to get rich quick. They strap a bomb to his chest and tell him that if he doesn’t rob a bank and bring back $100,000 dollars within 12 hours, the bomb will detonate. So Nick enlists the help of his best friend Chet (Aziz Ansari) and they set out to rob a bank. Shenanigans ensue.
The premise of this movie didn’t leave a lot of wiggle room as far as how the plot was going to play out, but it worked out nicely. While ‘30 Minutes…’ wasn’t an A-list comedy, it had excellent pacing and gave each aspect of the plot exactly the time it needed. Nothing dragged on for too long and nothing was skipped over.
The jokes were actually good and bad at the same time. The writers of this movie seemed to think that the more curse words were thrown into a sentence, the funnier it would be. While in some cases this worked out and created some truly memorable lines, it also seemed forced. Intelligent writing and original comedy was dropped in favor of cursing, and the result was somewhat mediocre.
The cast was chosen well, although the performances were nothing new for any of these actors. Oddly enough, my least favorite performance was from Eisenberg.
Eisenberg as a slacker pizza guy sounded and looked almost exactly like Eisenberg as Mark Zuckerberg from ‘The Social Network,’ only with slightly more cussing. Two of my favorite performances were actually from peripheral characters. Fred Ward plays a hard-ass ex-Marine who’s won the lottery and does it with style. Michael Pena plays Chango, a Mexican hit man who utters my favorite line from this film – “I got shot with a pen, bro!”
Overall, ‘30 Minutes or Less’ wasn’t terrible, and certainly warrants a viewing, but don’t spend your last bit of cash on seeing it in theaters. It’ll have the same effect on the small screen.
Luke Bohannon