30 MINUTES OR LESS (Ruben Fleischer). 82 minutes. Opens Friday (August 12). See listing Rating: NNN
30 Minutes Or Less may be the shabbiest, shruggiest heist movie ever made. If you’re expecting the next Heat, you’ll be sorely disappointed, but it’s enjoyable enough on its own very modest terms.
Ruben Fleischer’s follow-up to Zombieland sets up a very simple premise and plays it out precisely as far as it will go, and no further. Danny McBride and Nick Swardson play Grand Rapids thugs who rig a pizza delivery guy (Jesse Eisenberg) with a vest bomb and order him to rob a bank.
Fleischer abandons the hyper camerawork and self-aware cool of his earlier venture for something looser that focuses on the frantic incompetence of all the characters more than the crime plot itself.
Eisenberg (sorry, Oscar Nominee Jesse Eisenberg) is appropriately sweaty and terrified as the unwilling criminal McBride and Swardson have great, surly chemistry as the idiots who’ve wired him up and Michael Peña refines his nutbar Observe And Report performance for a role as a big-city hit man who gets mixed up in the action.
But it’s comic Aziz Ansari (Parks And Recreation) who walks off with the picture as Eisenberg’s resentful buddy, just by being Aziz Ansari.