Reviewed
by Lamar Kukuk
8/23/11
You
may recall a few years back in Pennsylvania, a pizza delivery guy attempted
to rob a bank, claimed criminals had grabbed him, attached an explosive
collar to his neck and forced him to do it, and then promptly blew up.
The strange case of Brian Wells, who was later more or less proven to have
been a conspirator in his own “abduction”, except for the part where he
didn’t realize that bomb would be real, makes a really odd inspiration
for a comedy, and 30 Minutes or Less is an oddly half-hearted action
comedy, saved by another first-rate performance by Jesse Eisenberg, who
basically hoists the movie on his back and hauls it around for 83 minutes
that contain little plot not glimpsed in the trailer. The script
by Michael Diliberti contains a lot of solid verbal humor, although the
casting of those wacky characters is hit-and-miss and the whole affair
makes an oddly second-rate follow-up to his Zombieland
breakthrough for director Ruben Fleischer. But what carries the day
is the same thing that fascinated the country about the Wells case:
somebody attaches a bomb to a guy and makes him rob a bank, and you really
can’t help but pay attention.
Reeling
from the collapse of his parents’ marriage, Nick (Jesse Eisenberg) has
settled into a slacker’s existence as a pizza delivery man. He pines
away for Kate (Dilshad Vadsaria), the sister of his best friend Chet (Aziz
Ansari), but she’s about to move out of town to accept a great job offer.
When he cops to his feelings, he and Chet have a blowout that ends their
friendship. Nick responds to a call to deliver to the middle of nowhere
and is grabbed by two goons in ape masks. They’re Dwayne (Danny McBride)
and Travis (Nick Swardson), two losers plotting the murder of Dwayne’s
lottery-winning Dad (Fred Ward). They’ve kinda hired a hitman (Michael
Pena), but he’ll need one hundred thousand dollars to do the job within
the day. So, when Nick wakes up, he finds a homemade bomb strapped
to his chest and is ordered to rob a bank for the money before the bomb’s
timer ticks down to zero. Desperate, he goes to the only person he
can think of for help, his former best friend. Together, having failed
to watch The Hurt Locker despite having gotten
it from Netflix, they’ve no choice but to try to rob that bank. But
even if they succeed, can they trust the bumbling bombers to give Nick
the shutdown code?
In
its closing scenes, 30 Minutes or Less finally wakes up to the kind
of Jenga game its plot demands as Nick, the kidnappers and the hitman start
trying to outguess each other’s limited intellects in hopes of coming out
on top. For too much of the running time, the plot is on auto-pilot,
and the trailer gives away almost every noteworthy moment that doesn’t
include R-rated language. A little of Dwayne and Travis’ Beavis &
Butt-head act goes a long way, although McBride does have some luck taking
the trash-talking trailer trash act upon which he’s built his career to
a new, homicidal level. The fact that this guy is so colossally,
sophomorically stupid but is still willing to kill without regret does
add an element of palpable danger to the plot. Travis is just along
for the ride and Swardson doesn’t do much but toss McBride softballs.
Ansari is good at selling a joke, but I didn’t buy him as a teacher or
Nick’s best friend. On the other hand, Ward is a hoot as the kind
of guy whose kid calls him The Major, and Pena does a great job creating
a really unique personality for the hitman who takes a whole lot more than
you might expect in stride.
But
what really saves 30 Minutes from turkeydom is Eisenberg, putting
on an interesting fusion of his two most notable performances in Zombieland
and The Social Network. Unlike every
other character in the movie, Nick isn’t dumb, he just doesn’t give a damn,
and the ferocity with which he wishes to be left to waste his life on a
dead end job he’s not even that good at (I don’t think he makes a single
delivery on time in the entire film) sets him up nicely to finally confront
what may be the final hours of his life. And when it all becomes
a battle of wits at the end, I liked how his being overqualified for the
job of kidnapped pizza delivery guy worked both for and against him when
trying to outmaneuver some really dim bulbs. Bottom line: I
cared about Nick, and I worried that there was a bomb strapped to his chest.
Not a whole lot else works as well as it should here, but if you can only
get one successful attribute, that’s the one you need.
I saw
30
Minutes or Less a couple days ago and already it’s hard for me to summon
more than about 15 minutes of what I saw: this is the ultimate 6th-choice
video rental or movie to watch on a winter afternoon when you’ve already
seen everything else that’s on. There’s a lot more potential in the
material than it delivers, and the whole Brian Wells case is really a far
better inspiration for a thriller than a slacker comedy. But it’s
pretty good inspiration for just about anything… as long as you care if
the guy blows up or not. |
