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Rating: W W Nick, left, played by Jesse Eisenberg, and Chet (Aziz Ansari) work together to try and rob a bank in ‘30 Minutes or Less.’
For a supposedly bawdy comedy, “30 Minutes or Less” is strangely subdued. The laughs come from small scenes: A hitman wincing as he treats a wound with rubbing alcohol, a wannabe tough guy leaving a phone message for a stripper that is alternately straightforward and salacious. A movie like this requires broad humor or a barrage of witty, withering retorts, not a collection of clever accents.
Especially when the premise (which mirrors a real-life 2003 case) is this bizarre. Jesse Eisenberg plays Nick, a twentysomething slacker who hauls his beat-up Mustang around Grand Rapids, Mich., delivering pizzas. Little is going right. Obviously, the job stinks. His longtime best friend, Chet (Aziz Ansari), wants nothing to do with him. And Chet’s attractive twin sister (Dilshad Vadsaria), the love of Nick’s crappy life, is heading to Atlanta for her dream job.
In another section of town, well-funded, badly coiffed screw-up Dwayne (Danny McBride) has had it with his millionaire father (Fred Ward), a retired military man who is blowing through his lottery winnings while retaining maximum hostility for his son. Dwayne can’t afford to wait for the inheritance. So, he and his sycophant, bomb-making friend, Travis (Nick Swardson), concoct a plan: They’ll strap explosives to a poor sap, force him to rob a bank, and use the money to fund the murder of Dwayne’s dad.
Nick, unfortunately, is that poor sap. Dwayne and Travis give him nine hours to complete the mission. If Nick decides to deviate from the plan — call the cops, escape, even fail to get the money — he’s dead. Panicking, Nick visits Chet at his teaching job. The two quickly make amends and proceed to put their vast knowledge of “Point Break” to the ultimate test. Alas, Chet hasn’t seen “The Hurt Locker,” so he can’t defuse the bomb.
Many excellent movies have employed a bickering duo forced to get out of a jam or solve a problem. Off the top of my head, here are three: “Midnight Run,” “Lethal Weapon” and “48 Hours.” What director Ruben Fleischer (“Zombieland”) fails to realize is that those movies succeeded because the humor came from the conflict between two very different personalities. Ansari and Eisenberg, both nerdy, nervous and sarcastic, are too similar. And both lack the big comedic personality to carry the movie on their slender shoulders.
Poor casting and seemingly random character development plagues the entire movie. After nearly a decade of playing awkward smart guys, culminating in his bravura performance as Mark Zuckerberg in last year’s “The Social Network,” are we supposed to buy Eisenberg as a rudderless, beer-drinking “man-child?” McBride is excellent, but his keen dramatic instincts feel misplaced, as does the emerging morality of Swardson’s dopey sidekick. Maybe these moves are supposed to give an air of humanity to the proceedings — the actual bank robber/pizza guy, Brian Wells, died — but all they do is stall any comedic momentum. “30 Minutes or Less” should be goofy, stupid fun. Fleischer and his cohorts, it turns out, are too smart for their own good.