30 Minutes or Less (2011)

The people who wrote this movie claim they had no real knowledge about the real-life incident with which it shares a strong similarity. It was an incident involving a young man with a bomb strapped to his neck who robbed a bank before exploding. He was actually in league with the other men involved with the robbery, unlike the hero of this film who is forced to commit the crime. Regardless, I fail to see how anyone would actually think such a case would actually make a good comedy. But never mind that; let's look even farther. There are plenty of great dark comedies that have dealt with all manner of gruesome situations and still managed to be entertaining and hilarious. Yet, I fail to see how anyone would actually think this movie, 30 Minutes or Less, is remotely funny, even in the most vague sense of the word.

Ruben Fleischer's first feature-length film as a director was Zombieland, which was an interesting and amusing little movie that featured the young talents of Emma Stone, Abigail Breslin, and Jesse Eisenberg, alongside Woody Harrelson. Eisenberg stars in 30 Minutes as well, right off of his incredible and loudly-praised performance in David Fincher's The Social Network. I can only imagine that he had a really great time working with Fleischer on Zombieland, because surely he wasn't drawn to the script. It is actually almost annoying to see what is clearly good talent going to waste in a completely thankless role that headlines an entirely insipid movie. Nobody involved with this production obviously has any sympathy for the poor pizza delivery boy who is flung into an extremely frightening situation, and that is how it is presented, and we are asked to laugh at him. It wouldn't even be so bad if we had some reason to laugh at him. Two idiots put a bomb on a kid and that is the joke all by itself. Absolutely no effort is made to make anything resembling real humor at any point. It just keeps going on and on with the one joke it has, and it isn't funny.

Let me be a little more specific. There is a scene that depicts Esienberg and his friend, played tediously by Aziz Ansari, discussing Ansari's sister and how Eisenberg shouldn't be allowed to go out with her. The conversation is exceptionally juvenile for these two grown men, and it ends with them sprawling on the floor and one of them nearly strangles the other. The entire scene runs for minutes and it is not the only one of its kind. The girlfriend character herself gets a few mere minutes of screentime, yet the shameless debates involving her go on for some time. This movie is only 80 minutes in length (Although it feels significantly longer, which is a good base for a "How long will you last in this movie? 30 minutes or less! HAHAHA!" joke.), and it seems like a majority of it is built around pointless conversations between one-sided morons, either the villains or the heroes, and then everything just ends. The whole thing ends up being nothing but a very long tasteless joke belonging more in a middle school cafeteria than in a big Hollywood production. I half-expected Eisenberg to blow up at the end, and spent most of the movie dreading whether or not it was going to be a punchline. He doesn't, but believe me, the actual ending is just as bad.

3/10