Dir. by Ruben Fleischer - 1 hr. 23 min.
Official Trailer
This was a movie that I was actually pretty excited to go see, and now that I have seen it, I don't have a whole lot to say about it. Yes, it is about as funny as you'd expect. If you're a fan of Danny McBride, Jesse Eisenberg, Nick Swardson, or Aziz Ansari, you're not going to be let down (although I thought Michael Pena knocked his role out of the park). If you're going because it's from the director of "Zombieland," well, it's not on that level.
Basically, you've got a film about how male friendships survive stress (in the guise of a dumb criminal caper plot). One of the things that is done really well is feeling like the pairs of guys (McBride and Swardson, and Eisenberg and Ansari) actually have been friends for a long time. That's the sort of thing than can float fairly inconsequential movies (like David Duchovny and Orlando Jones in "Evolution"), and take the air out of films when done poorly (which happens more often than I could count). And while I know it's a staple of this sort of film, the directionless of the core of main characters kind of drags things down. That sense of directionlessness isn't necessarily a movie-killer (see "Slacker" or "Clerks" to start with), but here I felt like it needed to either be amplified or addressed in some meaningful way. Yes, even in a superficially dumb comedy, these things need to be worked out.
Well, that's more words than I figured I'd squeeze out on the topic of "30 Minutes or Less." Yes, I laughed, and yes, I enjoyed it. You probably will, too. But there's not much about these 83 minutes that resonate beyond the cinema.
3 / 5 - Theatre
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