30 Minutes or Less

“You brought a gun to a f*ckin’ bomb fight!”

The H-Bomb: When Dwayne (Danny McBride), a thirty-something deadbeat do nothing, decides that he doesn’t want to wait for his rich, former-Marine father (Fred Ward) to keel over so he can collect his inheritance, he decides to have his old man whacked, just like in the movies. However, hiring a hit-man is going to cost him $100,000. So he, along with his slow witted, bomb building friend Travis (Nick Swarsdon), lure slacker pizza boy Nick (Jesse Eisenberg) out to their place and strap a bomb to him. The bomb is fitted with a timer, and if Nick doesn’t get them their cash by the time it runs out, then he will go ka-boom… and that would be bad for him, wouldn’t it?

So Nick, in pure panic mode, enlists the help of his estranged best friend, Chet (Aziz Ansari), to rob a bank and get these losers their money before he ends up in tiny little Nick pieces. The whole bank robbing thing doesn’t exactly go smoothly, much to the audience’s surprise, I’m sure, and the situation only gets worse when Dwayne’s hit-man Chango (Michael Pena) shows up looking for his money.

Brought to you by the director of “Zombieland”, “30 Minutes or Less” does have some hype leading up to its release. Does it live up to that hype? Well, if you’re expecting something as fresh and funny as “Zombieland”, then you will be somewhat let down. But, if you keep “Zombieland” out of mind, and judge the flick on its own, then I think you’ll find it is a quick, easy to watch action comedy that is fun, if not spectacular.

Myself, I actually laughed throughout “30 Minutes or Less”, and would be lying if I said I didn’t find it constantly amusing. But, thinking back on it, most of the laughs came through the one liners, the most memorable of which I used in the review’s subtitle, and for the most part, the movie is pretty unmemorable. That’s not to say I’ve forgotten most of it (How did it end again? Oh yeah, something blows up.), it’s just that there weren’t any real big laughs that stood out.

I think about the scenes that should have been hilarious show stoppers, like the bank robbery, or the big standoff at the end, and I realize that they were merely amusing, inducing only chuckles as opposed to all out laughter. As for the action half of this “action comedy,” the action scenes are entertaining (particularly a big car chase scene), but not really exciting or suspenseful.

The cast is energetic and overall great. Since most of the laughs in the movie come from the dialogue, the actors are the big reason to see it. That’s not to say anyone really stretches here. Eisenberg plays his typical high strung, fast talking nerd character, though this time he’s an underachieving nerd, so I guess that’s a departure from “The Social Network”. McBride is again a loser, only here he’s a sinister loser, and next to Swardson, the smart one. Ward is funny, even though his character, a hard ass ex-military type, is a rather dull cliché.  Ansari was the real standout for me. His character is kind of a creep, but a likeable creep who’s first introduced to us getting head and kissing afterwards. The biggest laugh I got is when we’re shown what he does for a living. Who would let their children around this guy?

The title “30 Minutes or Less” comes from a poorly conceived delivery campaign that a major pizza chain tried out some years back, but aside from a gag that introduces Nick’s character at the beginning of the movie, the phrase “30 Minutes or Less” doesn’t really factor into the plot… unless you consider that the whole story has a ticking clock element, but whatever. Apparently, it is based (very, very, very, very loosely) on a real incident, which was covered in Amadarwin’s review, so I won’t go into it here.

If you’re into movies like “Zombieland” or “Pineapple Express”, Hard R-rated comedies that dispense bloodshed and raunchy sex jokes in equal doses, then you’ll probably dig “30 Minutes or Less”, just bear in mind, it‘s not as good as either of those. At a scant 83 minutes, it’s too short to be boring, and, as said, is fairly funny through most of that quick running time. It’s just that overall, it never reached the level of hilarity that it should have, and it just isn’t much to write home about. If you’ve seen all the big blockbusters playing at a theater near you, then I say check it out. Otherwise, this is one for the Instant Queue.