30 MINUTES OR LESS - REVIEW


Another Jesse Eisenberg film from the director of Zombieland?!

Yes please!

With Danny McBride thrown in?

Oh you are too kind.

30 Minutes Or Less is one of those very decent comedies no-one sees when it comes out for some reason. I'm reminded of The Cable Guy or Observe And Report. 30 Minutes isn't quite as good or as dark as either but its clever premise alone makes it well worth seeing. Danny McBride plays the laziest of criminals in that all he needs to do is get rid of his father in order to get some kind of inheritance or whatever so he can be rich and get together with a lapdancer AND YET he chooses instead to hire a very expensive professional killer to do the job for him. But in order to do that, he needs rob a bank... but again he delegates that to Jesse Eisenberg's pizza boy by kidnapping him and strapping a bomb to his chest which he threatens to activate if he doesn't get the money in time.

Like I said: laziest criminal EVER.

Pretty lol I must admit.

Eisenberg does his usual schtick as a cocky pizza delivery boy with a crush on his friend's sister. He handles being a ticking time-bomb like a BAWS making life pretty difficult for McBride, and rightly so. His friend is played by Scrubs/Human Giant alumni Aziz Ansari and, frankly, he's not very good in this. Don't get me wrong, the character's alright but Ansari's comedic timing is all over the place and that stands out when McBride and Eisenberg achieve perfect timing effortlessly. The tone throughout the film is also a bit erratic: one second it's improv heavy and lol, the next it's kinda dark and weird (but still lol). Again, think a slightly less good Observe And Report.

30 Minutes Or Less tries to mesh two different subgenres together: the Lethal Weapon-style buddy cop movie and the dark Coen Brothers-esque comedy. It succeeds ok on both levels while not really nailing the original golden premise as well as it could have. Yes it ticks all the right boxes but it just fails to stand out and ends up being strangely forgettable. It's funny, smart and completely enjoyable while you're watching it but the next day, good luck remembering most of it. It's a good cast with a good script doing a good job but...

It's not Zombieland.

Good. Just not crazy-good.

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