30 Minutes Or Less (2011)
30 Minutes Or Less
★★☆☆☆
Directed by: Ruben Fleischer
Written by: Michael Diliberti and Matthew Sullivan
There is a peculiar moral bankruptcy that runs through 30 Minutes Or Less, a sort of bromance/comedy/crime caper of a movie. Never mind for a moment that the ostensible protagonist, Nick (played with affable familiarity by Jesse Eisenberg), has practically zero character arc and most of the film’s character development is focused on the bungling duo who involve Nick in a hair-brained plot so convoluted that I fear even trying to explain it below. What kills most of 30 Minutes Or Less is that it allows even the supposed heroes of the story to act like socially inebriated douchebags and has the audacity to demand we root for them anyway.
The basic plot is that Dwayne (played with tormented man-child bi-polar disorder by Danny McBride) wants to survive long enough to receive his inheritance from an overbearing, Lotto-winning father (played with zero originality as the overbearing military father guy by Fred Ward). A stripper convinces Dwayne that he would be better served by hastening the outcome and says she knows a guy who can help get it done, for the price of $100,000. Unwilling to put himself on the line, Dwayne recruits his pyrotechnically-inclined buddy, Travis (played with whipped puppy enthusiasm by Nick Swardson), to rig up a bomb vest and recruit some random sucker to earn their money, hire the assassin and net them with the funds to achieve their dreams.
Enter Nick, a stuck-in-neutral twentysomething who works as a pizza delivery guy, racing his car around and smoking dope. His best friend is Chet (a transplanted Tom Haverford from Parks and Recreation via Aziz Ansari) is a schoolteacher, and Chet’s twin sister Kate (the one bright spot in the cast, Dilshad Vadsaria, completely and utterly underutilized here) is Nick’s dream girl/friendzoner. She reveals plans to move away, which puts backburnered Nick into panic mode and he ends up telling Chet about an old rendezvous with Kate—the catalyst, apparently, for his unrequited love—and a lot of other secrets come out and the two part on bad terms.
When Nick is lured into a trap and kidnapped by Dwayne and Travis, they strap a bomb on his chest and tell him he has less than a day to come up with $100,000 and deliver it to the hitman or they’ll blow up the bomb remotely. Nick has to face his rift with Chet and recruit him to help and eventually they decide there is no other solution but to go ahead and rob a bank. The heist goes off with only a few hiccups, but when Nick takes the money to the hitman (played with squeaky-voiced semi-menace by Michael Peña), he realizes there was no attempt to provide the code that will disarm the bomb and he ends up escaping with the money and a long sequence of people yelling at each other occurs resulting in Dwayne and Travis kidnapping Kate to force Nick’s hand.
Okay, so spoiler alert: Nick and Chet rescue Kate and wind up with the money. It’s a happy ending. Hey, this is supposed to be a comedy, right? Here’s the problem: Throughout, Chet and Nick act like giddy schoolchildren as they elude police, terrorize a bank full of innocent civilians, find time to have a heart-to-heart about their disagreements and assault a number of people with physical violence before ultimately causing someone else’s death in order to elude capture. If not for a credit cookie at the tail end, it might be inferred that they willfully killed a second person.
Look, it’s thing to have a character who is a pothead and drives recklessly while delivering pizzas, it’s another to have a guy forced into committing a bank robbery who thinks that, when things work out in his favor, it’s perfectly acceptable to keep the money. For him to also get amped and excited about high speed police chases in which cops and probably civilians are injured or even killed, and to celebrate minor physical victories like hitting a guy in the face with a crowbar, it becomes very difficult to view these as relatable characters. It doesn’t help that they don’t get much in the way of actual progress; one supposes by the end that Nick and Kate will find each other and Chet will be okay with it and Nick will, having been prompted to also quit his dead-end job, turn his life around, but none of that is a given.
Even the film’s antagonists, probably intended to be slapsticky and funny-dumb, are sociopathic (excepting Travis who is portrayed as weak and simple-minded, not just in addition to being moral but it almost seems like because he is) and also ultimately victorious. It’s not really a dark comedy, but it feels like it oscillates between depravity and lightness unintentionally, as though the writers had no idea what their choices were actually doing. Contrast this with something like Pulp Fiction, which has plenty of lighthearted moments but never once loses sight of what it is and what its characters mean. 30 Minutes Or Less is full of characters who, by benefit of being witness to their actions, we can see as being incongruent with the tone and the context of the overall story.
It doesn’t help that while 30 Minutes Or Less has a handful of genuinely funny lines and a handful of funny scenes, is a “you saw most of the good stuff in the trailer” film. That is to say, the key jokes and gags are of the sort that you can get the full effect from a three-second snippet while you fiddle with opening your Junior Mints box. In other words: Fairly lazy.
There’s no reason for me to loathe 30 Minutes Or Less, and I don’t hate it at all, but I don’t like it either. I don’t like that I was annoyed by all the characters and that the contrivance of the plot took more work to set up than it did to resolve (did no one think of cutting the vest at a different section than the rigged front?), nor do I like that a goofy comedy caper made me think more about the morality of writing than I intended to at midnight before a Monday morning. I do like that I didn’t pay any more than my regular Netflix subscription for it, though. So I guess it had one thing going for it.