Movie review: ’30 Minutes or Less’

One of the shaggiest of buddy comedies to come along in the past few years, 30 Minutes or Less shouldn’t work as well as it does. It’s an ugly premise with gruesome consequences, inspired by a real-life incident in Pennsylvania that did not end well. Nevertheless, it yields a fair amount of absurdist comedy thanks in part to the cast as well as the fact that when truth is stranger than fiction, it’s best to just run with the ridiculousness of it.

 

Jesse Eisenberg finally sheds some of his geek-charm to play Nick, a twentysomething pizza delivery driver going nowhere fast who falls into the orbit of Dwayne (Danny McBride) and his sidekick Travis (Nick Swardson). Dwayne wants to kill his bullying ex-Marine father (Fred Ward in full macho mode) so that he can inherit millions.

 

In order to pay the hitman (a wonderfully bizarre Michael Peña) hired by his gold-digging stripper girlfriend (Bianca Kajlich), he and Travis kidnap Nick, strap a timebomb to him, and force him to rob a bank before he’s made to go kerblooey. A panicked Nick fast-talks his roommate/best friend Chet (Parks and Recreation‘s Aziz Ansari) into helping him out of his predicament.

 

Wackiness ensues in spades, as the movie doesn’t let up once Nick is placed in jeopardy, working bank robbery, car theft, double-crosses, and assorted action beats at a breakneck pace. Screenwriter Michael Diliberti and director Ruben Fleischer (who worked with Eisenberg on Zombieland) have a firm grasp of their target audience — the prized 18- to 40-year-old male demographic — and hit the bullseye accordingly; thus you have the prerequisite car chases, gunplay, explosions, and F-bombs, as well as the ubiquitous scene in a topless bar. That said, they also make an effort to make a movie that stands on its own, at least long enough to survive its 80-minute runtime.

 

It also doesn’t hurt by having commited performances from the cast. It’s nice to see Eisenberg break out of the mold that has trapped Michael Cera, deftly shifting gears from neurotic nerd charm to no-life slacker jerk, and he plays well against Ansari’s manic sarcasm. McBride is cast according to type, playing the sort of undeservingly arrogant slob with grandiose dreams and limited grasp that have so far defined his career. Peña, however, almost steals the show at times as the somewhat insecure hired killer.