Winner of several imaginary literary and filmmaking awards.30 Minutes or Less could've been titled Paycheck, since that seems to be the only motivating factor for anyone involved in the movie -- from above-the-title stars to below-the-line crew members -- to actually participate in its creation. Popular, talented, well-known actors run around with as much energy as they can possibly feign, being directed by a talented filmmaker who apparently realized too late that this was the wrong project to take on as a follow-up to his dynamo first feature, and the result feels as phoned-in as an order to the local pizza shack. Nearly every element feels forced and incongruous in the film, from the screenplay -- which wants desperately to mimic the gleeful chaos of a Seth Rogen/Evan Goldberg script like Pineapple Express or The Green Hornet -- to the directing of actors, which must've consisted of director Ruben Fleischer telling his cast, "Go watch any Judd Apatow movie and then act like that." Unfortunately, imitating successful comedy filmmakers does not make a movie funny, or interesting, or even morbidly curious as a failure. This one sits dead on the screen, stringing stale and offensive one-liners through a series of leaden action sequences and telling a story so uninspired, incoherent, and insignificant it barely registers as a potential entertainment.
So how, exactly, did the project attract all this talent? Jesse Eisenberg, fresh off his brilliant Oscar-nominated performance in The Social Network, plays the hero, while the typically hilarious and in-demand Danny McBride plays the villain, with en vogue offbeat comedians Aziz Ansari (Observe and Report) and Nick Swardson (Just Go With It) as their respective sidekicks. Insert Fleischer as director, on the heels of gaining serious cinematic capital after the guns-blazing awesomeness of Zombieland, and one would hope for the summer's smartest, coolest, most anachronistic comedy. But the actors appear less interested with every subsequent line reading, never coming into sync with the quirky charisma that made them stars. And Fleischer, who deftly created his own zeitgeist-y world in his first film, now appears lost in a tonal haze, unable to ignite a single moment of charm, let alone recapture the magic of Zombieland.
The "story" is tissue paper-thin and yet is somehow overly-complicated, with Eisenberg's pizza delivery boy drawn into a bank-robbing scheme by idiot slackers McBride and Swardson. They strap a bomb to the kid's chest (these idiots can build a bomb?) and give him 10 hours (so...maybe call it 10 Hours or Less?) to bring them $100,000 from the local bank, which they will give to a stripper, who will get her hitman boyfriend to kill McBride's rich father (poor Fred Ward) so the slackers can claim the inheritance and use it to open a tanning salon with a backdoor prostitution ring. Comedy gold, right?
A plot this stupid should at least understand its vapidity and take an attitude toward it, but 30 Minutes or Less operates under the apparent assumption that its story is engaging, or that it at least makes sense within a screw-loose comedic context. It doesn't. The movie is a tonal disaster, blending smart-aleck comedy with hard-boiled crime and vague satire with insipid earnestness, all peppered with language and scenarios so ugly and cruel that the only emotion that arises out of 80 minutes of near-constant boredom is uneasy disgust. Raunchy comedy works when it is humane. 30 Minutes or Less seems to use inhumanity as a plot mechanism, and it's not even slick enough hide its disdain under a sheen of professionalism. The actors are bored, the director is lost, the writing is hateful, and the audience will be non-existent.
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