From director Ruben Fleischer (Zombieland) comes the action-comedy 30 Minutes or Less starring Jesse Eisenberg (The Social Network, Zombieland) as Nick, a pizza delivery guy who gets way more than he bargained for during a routine run. Two masked men strap a bomb to his chest, and tell Nick he must get them $100,000 or be explosively splattered into bloody chunks. Nick recruits his best friend, Chet (Parks and Recreation's Aziz Ansari) to help him pull off this impossible feat, despite their just having had a particularly bad fight. The unwilling criminals embark on a hilariously inept (and totally unbelievable) crime spree that includes grand theft auto, bank robbery, assault and fleeing police in a high speed chase.
While Nick and Chet are the main characters, an equal amount of time is spent with their antagonists. Dwayne (Danny McBride) and Travis (Nick Swardson) are a pair of wannabe criminal masterminds whose scheming goes deeper than simply wanting money. Dwayne, working off the advice of a stripper named Juicy, decides to kill his lottery-winning, ex-marine father (Fred Ward). Juicy even knows someone who will do it for 100 grand, and the men plan to utilize Travis' (somewhat inexplicable) bomb-building skills to force someone into collecting the money for them.
30 Minutes or Less earns its laughs primarily through the dysfunctional friendships and total incompetence of its main characters. While Nick and Chet know enough about thug life to wear masks and use a getaway car that's not connected to them, they are hardly hardened criminals. ("Have a nice day," says Chet after committing one crime.) Eisenberg and Ansari make a great comedic team, with Eisenberg tapping into a more anxious side of himself that I've only seen in interviews and using it to branch out from his usual awkward, antisocial schtick (Columbus in Zombieland, Mark Zuckerberg in The Social Network). Swardson plays a perfect dopey sidekick to McBride's villain with daddy issues. Although Dwayne and Travis aren't involved in most of the action, they orchestrate it and most of their laughs come from the unbalanced sycophantic nature of their relationship. Dwayne has zero redeeming qualities, unless you count having Travis as a friend. Travis, although easily manipulated, just doesn't want anyone (other than Dwayne's father) to get hurt.
30 Minutes or Less is more about these friendships than the schemes and antics, though the plot does push and test the characters and their relationships in an extreme, yet hilarious way. By basing the film in these relationships, director Fleischer has made a movie that manages to rise above the often-substandard genre that it's a part of, just like he did with Zombieland.
This article appears in Aug 11-17, 2011.