30 Minutes or Less

This buddy caper-comedy teams nerdy pizza-delivery guy Nick (Jesse Eisenberg) with bumbling Chet (Aziz Ansari), a substitute schoolteacher pal and reluctant roommate. Nick is abducted by two bickering sociopaths—Dwayne (Danny McBride) and Travis (Nick Swardson)—wearing gorilla masks, who strap a ticking C4 bomb vest to his chest and force him to rob a bank, demanding that he produce $100,000 in 10 hours, or else. This kidnapping is an integral part of Dwayne's idea to hire a thug (Michael Peña) to kill his ex-Marine father (Fred Ward)—a multimillion-dollar lottery winner—so he can open a brothel under the auspices of a tanning salon. Named for the time-pressured pizza parlor where Nick works, director Ruben Fleischer's 30 Minutes or Less comes up several slices short on the making sense front, delivering neither an interesting heist plan nor a compelling slacker subplot. What we have instead is a moronic exercise in racial, gay, and penis jokes coupled with a steady stream of inane profanity spewed by the central quartet of losers. Not recommended. [Note: DVD/Blu-ray extras include the “Blowing Up with the Cast & Crew” making-of featurette (14 min.), deleted scenes (12 min.), outtakes (6 min.), and trailers. Exclusive to the Blu-ray release is a picture-in-picture video commentary (with director Ruben Fleischer and costars Jesse Eisenberg, Aziz Ansari, Danny McBride, and Nick Swardson), “The Perfect Crime: Action and Comedy” production featurette (11 min.), and the BD-Live function. Bottom line: a solid extras package for a lame film.] (S. Granger)