Ratings
The Daily: 3/5 stars
Rotten Tomatoes: 43%
More on '30 Minutes or Less'
IMDB
Official website
“30 Minutes or Less” opens with a man on the move, perhaps a bit broken inside, certainly down on his luck, but pushing down on the accelerator of life anyway — hurtling into the film’s very first frame, banged-up Mustang carrying him onward. At the wheel is Nick (Jesse Eisenberg), smoking something of indeterminate origin, blowing red lights, running stop signs, blasting through train crossings, delivering pizzas. Nick’s daily mandate is to get pie to sadistic kids residing in distant counties in a half hour or under, and he never really seems to make it in time, for all his flashy driving. His many troubles tend to begin, as they do for many in the suburbs, the moment he steps out of the car.
This is especially true when, deep into a shift, and in a spat with his best pal Chet (Aziz Ansari), Nick finds himself pulling up to a junkyard, where he is greeted by two primates — Dwayne (Danny McBride) and his sidekick Travis (Nick Swardson), human gorillas wearing gorilla masks. Dwayne, tormented by his sadistic, lottery-winning ex-Marine dad and his own lack of initiative, is making his move. A stripper at a local bar tells Dwayne that $100,000 will buy an assassin willing to take his father out, and thus put him in the position to inherit lotto millions — not to mention dad’s wicked collection of cars with screaming eagle decals on them.
Nick is the medium, the man to which Dwayne and Travis will attach a bomb set to go off after 10 hours, during which time Nick will be expected to rob a bank. If he manages it, the two apes assure him, they’ll be happy to remove the vest.
Not-so-charmingly, this plot twist is based on a horrific true story. But “30 Minutes or Less,” for all its vulgarity — tanning salon prostitution rings and bare stripper breasts and jokes about AIDS — is very much of the right-now, emo-action school, in which one or two or a whole gang of incompetent young dudes huddle against one another and shriek their way through danger and interpersonal conflict alike. Like most men in their late 20s or early 30s, all they have are the buddy comedies they watched as children to guide them.
After Chet is recruited from the classroom in which he’s teaching by a bomb-laden Nick, he turns first to the internet — “There’s not a lot of consensus in the bomb-disarming community,” he concludes — and then to “Point Break,” a veritable “how-to guide” to robbing a bank. Earlier, the two friends have a falling out while watching “Die Hard,” and Chet will hurt Nick’s feelings yet again by declining to join him in a late night viewing of “Lethal Weapon.” Dwayne and Travis, for their part, psych themselves up by watching 3-D clips from the “Friday the 13th” franchise.
The density of pop references here is somewhere between totally accurate and perhaps a little too self-aware, as when director Ruben Fleischer sets a vivid and well-executed car chase to Glenn Frey’s “Beverly Hills Cop” soundtrack standby “The Heat Is On.” One sort of waits for Fleischer or Ansari or Eisenberg or McBride to drop the quotation marks and commit to the blowing-things-up enterprise in earnest.
Is it that irony and meta-textual jokes are so inescapably part of the way we express ourselves now that Hollywood can only make funny action films when they are about still other, and older, funny action films? Perhaps we should just blame McBride, who was on set for “Pineapple Express” and “Your Highness” as well — two more films where the good guys never seem to fully embrace becoming grown men, even after they’ve killed a few of them.
The Daily: 3/5 stars
Rotten Tomatoes: 43%
More on '30 Minutes or Less'
IMDB
Official website
“30 Minutes or Less” opens with a man on the move, perhaps a bit broken inside, certainly down on his luck, but pushing down on the accelerator of life anyway — hurtling into the film’s very first frame, banged-up Mustang carrying him onward. At the wheel is Nick (Jesse Eisenberg), smoking something of indeterminate origin, blowing red lights, running stop signs, blasting through train crossings, delivering pizzas. Nick’s daily mandate is to get pie to sadistic kids residing in distant counties in a half hour or under, and he never really seems to make it in time, for all his flashy driving. His many troubles tend to begin, as they do for many in the suburbs, the moment he steps out of the car.
This is especially true when, deep into a shift, and in a spat with his best pal Chet (Aziz Ansari), Nick finds himself pulling up to a junkyard, where he is greeted by two primates — Dwayne (Danny McBride) and his sidekick Travis (Nick Swardson), human gorillas wearing gorilla masks. Dwayne, tormented by his sadistic, lottery-winning ex-Marine dad and his own lack of initiative, is making his move. A stripper at a local bar tells Dwayne that $100,000 will buy an assassin willing to take his father out, and thus put him in the position to inherit lotto millions — not to mention dad’s wicked collection of cars with screaming eagle decals on them.
Nick is the medium, the man to which Dwayne and Travis will attach a bomb set to go off after 10 hours, during which time Nick will be expected to rob a bank. If he manages it, the two apes assure him, they’ll be happy to remove the vest.
Not-so-charmingly, this plot twist is based on a horrific true story. But “30 Minutes or Less,” for all its vulgarity — tanning salon prostitution rings and bare stripper breasts and jokes about AIDS — is very much of the right-now, emo-action school, in which one or two or a whole gang of incompetent young dudes huddle against one another and shriek their way through danger and interpersonal conflict alike. Like most men in their late 20s or early 30s, all they have are the buddy comedies they watched as children to guide them.
After Chet is recruited from the classroom in which he’s teaching by a bomb-laden Nick, he turns first to the internet — “There’s not a lot of consensus in the bomb-disarming community,” he concludes — and then to “Point Break,” a veritable “how-to guide” to robbing a bank. Earlier, the two friends have a falling out while watching “Die Hard,” and Chet will hurt Nick’s feelings yet again by declining to join him in a late night viewing of “Lethal Weapon.” Dwayne and Travis, for their part, psych themselves up by watching 3-D clips from the “Friday the 13th” franchise.
The density of pop references here is somewhere between totally accurate and perhaps a little too self-aware, as when director Ruben Fleischer sets a vivid and well-executed car chase to Glenn Frey’s “Beverly Hills Cop” soundtrack standby “The Heat Is On.” One sort of waits for Fleischer or Ansari or Eisenberg or McBride to drop the quotation marks and commit to the blowing-things-up enterprise in earnest.
Is it that irony and meta-textual jokes are so inescapably part of the way we express ourselves now that Hollywood can only make funny action films when they are about still other, and older, funny action films? Perhaps we should just blame McBride, who was on set for “Pineapple Express” and “Your Highness” as well — two more films where the good guys never seem to fully embrace becoming grown men, even after they’ve killed a few of them.
