30 Minutes or Less
Time Out New York Project: Issue #824, August 11-17, 2011
★★★☆☆
Dir. Ruben Fleischer. 2011. R. 83mins. Jesse Eisenberg, Danny McBride, Nick Swardson, Aziz Ansari.
Pop quiz, hotshot: You’re a pot-smoking pizza delivery guy (Eisenberg) who sits around all day watching ’80s action movies and pining for the sister of your best friend (Ansari). Then your world turns upside down when two dudes (McBride and Swardson) in monkey masks strap a bomb to your chest and demand you rob a bank, so one of them can pay an assassin to kill his tyrannical father and inherit even larger sums of cash. What do you do!?!
If you’re Eisenberg’s Nick, you hop aboard the pineapple express that is Ruben Fleischer’s hard-R comedy, which feels padded even at 83 minutes yet still provides plenty of gut-busting guffaws. Many of these come courtesy of the Social Network star’s deadpan delivery (appropriately, a tossed-off line about Facebook brings down the house) and Ansari’s bug-your-eyes-till-it’s-funny brand of humor. McBride and Swardson’s dumb-duo act is considerably more grating; their biggest laugh comes early on with a profane bit of business involving Friday the 13th Part III. Some shoehorned-in scenes of violence — such as one character’s horrifying death-by-flamethrower — cut too-unsettlingly against the comedy. But it’s hard to hate a movie that affectionately references the oeuvre of Kathryn Bigelow (both The Hurt Locker and Point Break!) and uses a whiny Third Eye Blind ballad as an acidic punch line.—Keith Uhlich
