30 Minutes or Less

2011 comedy

Rating: 12/20

Plot: A pair of criminals plan the perfect crime but don't have enough money to execute it. So they plan another perfect crime--kidnap a pizza delivery person, strap a bomb to him, and force him to rob a bank. Poor Jesse Eisenberg.

This is the exoskeleton of something that Don Knotts and Tim Conway would have been in with raunchiness and loudness stuck to it. The problem might be that Jesse Eisenberg is no Don Knotts. Nobody is. See, part of me--especially after his really good work in The Social Network and the humorous The Living Wake which might just be funny despite him--wants to push our differences aside, forget that his sister made those Pepsi commercials which did worse things to my stomach than drinking carbonated beverages could ever do, forgive him for a brow which he can't even help, and try to like the guy. But after liking him in a couple movies, this happens. He's not really the problem with this at all though. Neither is Aziz Ansari who I also want to like, probably just because he's on Parks and Recreation. Their chemistry here as BFF's seems a little forced. Then again, I'm pretty sure it would be hard for anybody to stand next to Jesse Eisenberg in a movie and make whatever relationship seem natural. I do like how Ansari is referred to as a "mini-genie" here. Oh, and Michael Pena plays a character named Chang, and he just grabs this character by the nuts and runs with it. This ends up just being another one of those modern comedies, one that takes a clever enough idea and fails to do enough with it. There are some funny individual lines ("You had a lunchables for dinner.") and I thought it was funny how Nick Swardson's character made monkey noises during the kidnapping scene. And I really liked this bit of dialogue:

Swardson's dumb character: Where the hell did all these leaves come from?
Danny McBride's dumb character: Where do you think? Fucking trees.
Swardson's dumb character: That's what she said.

But too often, the humor in this seems like it was collected by spinning The Hangover or Superbad around really fast and waiting for some stuff to fly off so that it could be inserted in this script. I don't think I'll remember much about this movie in a few months, and I doubt I start quoting it this weekend at my 20 year reunion.