30 Minutes or Less

The bank robbery sequence in 30 Minutes or Less is very, very funny. If that sequence were a stand-alone YouTube video, I would've laughed my ass off, posted a comment remarking on its brilliance, and that would've been that. Unfortunately, this amusing sequence has been sandwiched into a movie in which the events that come before and after it are positively lame, severely lacking in comedic bite. For both director Ruben Fleischer and actor Jesse Eisenberg, this is a massive step down from Zombieland. What confounds me the most is that, while both films are quite economical in length (slightly exceeding the 80-minute mark), Zombieland packs SO MUCH MORE comedy, twists, entertaining action sequences, witty dialogue and strong character development into its 80-odd minutes than 30 Minutes or Less ever does. This film is the epitome of comedic laziness.

Dwayne (Danny McBride) is a lazy doofus who lives off his rich dad. His dad demeans him all the time (probably deservedly so), and there's only so much more of it that Dwayne can take. He talks to his equally inept buddy Travis (Nick Swardson), and they decide the best thing to do may be to kill his dad, so that Dwayne can just inherit all his money. But because they're so ridiculously dumb, they can't kill him themselves, so they hire a hit man. The hit man is charging them $100,000, which they don't have. So, they need to steal that sum of money, but again, because they're so dumb, they think the best thing is to force someone to steal it for them. In order to do that, the best idea they come up with is to beat up a guy till he falls unconscious, strap a bomb to him and then tell him he has to steal the $100,000 or the bomb will explode. The poor victim of Dwayne and Travis' ineptitude is Nick (Jesse Eisenberg), who works as a pizza delivery boy. Understandably scared shitless, Nick, with the bomb strapped to his body, seeks help from his friend Chet (Aziz Ansari), in order to obtain the money and get this problem (literally) off his back.

Yes, I know it all sounds like it's got all the perfect ingredients to make for a brilliant buddy comedy a la Pineapple Express, but the results are far from that. The script is witless, the performances lacking even the urgency to ooze humor, and there aren't even any intense or well-choreographed chase sequences. As the movie progressed, I honestly cared very little about whether Nick and his bomb blew up and about whether Dwayne's convoluted plan to get his dad killed would work or not. Oh, and let's call a spade a spade: this film is totally racist. Some of the references made about the stereotype of Hispanics as being all criminals and gangsters are positively lame, and perhaps the worst offender of all is the line "Shit just got real, slumdog" (and the fact that it's said to a woman makes matters infinitely worse). If you're unconscionable enough to find a line like that funny, more power to you. I find it lame and unfunny, and I'm not even Indian. All this did was remind me of the brilliant way in which the Harold and Kumar films handled racial jokes: the level of offensiveness was constantly offset by the film's witticisms, whereas in 30 Minutes or Less, it's all just "Oh, look, they made a joke about black people! Haha!".

If this year has proven something about Danny McBride, it's that his supporting role in Pineapple Express may have been a one-hit wonder. He was abetted by that film's terrifically funny script, but this year, with both this and Your Highness, he's embodied mediocrity. Again, let's call a spade a spade: this guy sucks. He's not funny. Hollywood may try to push him as hard as it wants, but it's not gonna work. As for Jesse Eisenberg, this is exactly the kind of movie you DON'T make after scoring an Oscar nomination. I don't have a problem with his performance, which doesn't ask him to do a lot. I have a problem with the fact that I know he could've been as great as he usually is if he had only told Fleischer "No, I won't star in your second movie unless the script is as good or better than Zombieland's script." It's too bad. There's a small moment early on in the film that I appreciated in which a quick reference is made to Eisenberg's character "not being on Facebook," but that's a small blip of funny in an otherwise unamusing affair.

The worst offender, I'm sorry to say, is Aziz Ansari, and come to think of it, the failure of 30 Minutes or Less is in large part due to his performance. You see, this should've been a fresh buddy comedy, in which his character and Eisenberg's got to play off each other and traded quips with one another. But Ansari plays it way too demonstratively. Literally, all he does throughout the film is widen his eyes and flail his arms about. Worst of all, when he delivers his lines, they sound so painfully memorized that it's cringe-inducing. There's a moment in which there's a sudden possibility that the bomb will go off, and Ansari's delivery of the line "Get me out of the car!" is atrociously bad. The reason why I say it's too bad that his work is so weak here is that I actually really appreciated some of the more minor work he's done in the past. I still remember reeling from laughter in I Love You, Man during the scene in which his character says, in a very deadpan way, that he and his buddies are heading over to Joshua Tree. Maybe the problem is that he's good enough for that type of role, but that his over-demonstrative schtick just gets too annoying for a full-length film. The fact that he plays it that way while Eisenberg plays it straight should've made for a delightful contrast, but instead, there's just a complete lack of comedic chemistry between them.

Like I said, the absolute exception to everything I've said so far comes with the bank robbery sequence, which feels like it belongs in a completely different film. It starts out with a bit of clumsy awkwardness involving people passing a gun from one person to another. What happens when one of the money bags is opened is total hilarity of the silly variety. But perhaps the reason why this scene works so well is that the two characters are wearing masks the entire time, so it's like, for a moment, we forget about the lifeless and unfunny idiots who had dominated the film up to that point and get to relish in how funny the scene is. Too bad they take their masks off and the film continues. 30 Minutes or Less is a rarity because, while it may be short in running length, it feels terribly long, probably because one is impatiently waiting for the laughs to come. I was hoping that a hilarious final showdown would save it, but no such luck. The ending is haphazard at best, and I was shocked by how weak the very last scene is in terms of how the villain is finally dispatched. Gone is the incredibly fun, zippy energy that characterized Zombieland. The foursome in that film was infinitely more interesting and worth cheering for than the four depressingly lackluster losers who inhabit the decidedly unfunny world of 30 Minutes or Less. What a disappointment.

4/10