Director Ruben Fleischer made a great movie with Zombieland. It was funny, sometimes gross, but overall very enjoyable. With 30 Minutes or Less Fleischer reunited with Jesse Eisenberg. With no zombies in this movie, does it manage to reach the same heights as Zombieland did?
The plot for this movie is fairly simple. Nick (Jesse Eisenberg) is a pizza delivery guy who has to deliver his pizzas, as you probably guessed it, in 30 minutes or less. He lives together with his friend Chet (Aziz Ansari) and is secretly seeing Chet’s sister. Dwayne (Danny McBride) and Travis (Nick Swardson) are two losers who basically enjoy themselves by blowing stuff up. Dwayne’s father is rich (money he got winning a lottery) and Dwayne is waiting for his father to die, but decides he can’t wait and together with Travis they think of this amazing plan to get money to hire a hitman. Of course they don’t want to get the money themselves and decide to put a bomb vest on Nick and force him to rob a bank.
It’s an interesting setup for a comedy and there are some laughs to be had, but it all felt too sterile to me. The world this took place in didn’t seem very alive, it actually felt like sets. There just wasn’t enough happening on the street to make it convincing, almost no traffic and people. That might have worked in Zombieland, but here it felt weird. I also didn’t feel any chemistry between Ansari and Eisenberg. Their characters supposedly have known each other for years, but I just didn’t get that. Most of the comedy came from McBride and Swardson.
30 Minutes or Less unfortunately didn’t manage to have me laughing enough, which of course is important in a comedy. Fleischer unfortunately didn’t manage to deliver something which was as much fun to watch as Zombieland.
Score: 5
I thought as much Nostra. I have only seen large clips, but I found it annoying.
Great write up as ever.
Good to have you back in the living
Yeah, it’s a shame it was so disappointing as I really liked the idea behind it.
Glad to be back!
great review, Nostra. This looked moderately funny, may check it out for myself one day.
Thanks a lot rodders!
I saw the trailer for this a while back, and through it was a pretty funny concept for a film – but it’s had no publicity whatsoever here in Australia. Such a shame, considerig the starring role of Social Network dude Eisenberg, they could have really tapped into his current a-list status.
Yeah, haven’t seen too much marketing for it here either, but then again not a lot of money is usually spent on the promotion of comedies….
Ah, that’s too bad that you didn’t like it. I used to live near Grand Rapids, where this was filmed, and it is actually pretty desolate in certain parts. It’s not too surprising that it turned out that way on film. I thought Eisenberg and Ansari had good chemistry, as did McBride and Swardson. I might be a little biased since I grew up in the area where they filmed this, but I think this is one of 2011’s most underrated movies.
In this one I have to say that we disagree 🙂
Oh man, what a shame!
I was really looking forward to seeing this one. I had seen a couple of trailers and I thought it looked good and had an interesting plot given the actors playing them. It’s a shame that it didn’t turn out great, well I’ll give it a watch on DVD…
Good review mate.
Comedies are very personal, so you should give it a chance, maybe you will love it 🙂
It’s funny, quick, and very dumb but that’s the way I like my comedies and I was very glad that this film didn’t try to over-stay its welcome. Good review Nostra.