30 Minutes or Less

It’s true, I finally started watching movies again. So, yay! If you find Jesse Eisenberg to be the premiere personable actor of his generation no matter how horrible of a human being he is portraying, or if you find Danny McBride to be a compelling poor- / gross-man’s Seth Rogen, or especially if you think Aziz Ansari’s voice makes his every line somewhere between two and three times as funny as it would have been in another actor’s mouth, and if you don’t mind your dark grey comedy having plot holes a pizza delivery guy could drive through, then you could do a whole lot worse at the dollar theater than 30 Minutes or Less.

Pretty dim praise, right? I laughed quite a lot, don’t get me wrong, but on top of the plot holes, which were pretty galling for reals, there just weren’t any likable characters. The heroes merely won the title of least hateful, and that’s kind of impressively sad. In a way, Danny McBride’s villain sidekick may have been morally better than any of the stars, and he was still quite certainly a villain.[1] But anyway, if you still think a couple bucks and the 90 minutes  are worth your time, I’ll tell you that this is a movie in which a couple of bad guys force a dead-end, largely friendless pizza deliveryman to rob a bank, by strapping a bomb to him. And while I bet there’s a potentially really solid drama somewhere in that plot, and that it is possibly named Dog Day Afternoon, this is definitely more the “hijinx ensue” version.

Enjoy. Or not. But Ansari really is kind of hilarious, so.

[1] Okay, the romantic interest had no problems, she just wasn’t enough of a character to get a handle on, aside from “I can see why Jesse wants to go to there”.

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