Is it possible for Danny McBride to not be funny? Playing a criminal who is tailing the unfortunate pizza-delivery guy whom he forces to rob a bank by strapping a bomb to him in “30 Minutes or Less,” McBride comes upon the aftermath of a car chase and says to another onlooker, slowly and awkwardly: “I hope that they catch the guy.”
He says it in such a forced manner that the bystander must immediately know that McBride is a criminal himself. And it’s the funniest moment in a stupid-funny movie filled with them. If dumb humor is an art, McBride must be its Rembrandt. Last spring’s “Your Highness” got god-awful reviews, so I didn’t see it, but now I’m thinking: “With McBride delivering the lines, even that one must be watchable, right?”
Also well-cast in “30 Minutes or Less” — which is about as delicious and nutritious as a quickly delivered pizza — is “Parks and Recreation’s” Aziz Ansari as the best bud of the aforementioned pizza guy, Jesse Eisenberg, who plays the straight man here like he did in director Ruben Fleischer’s previous film, “Zombieland.” But whereas that movie was a great premise with bland execution, this is a great premise with decent execution — mostly due to the cast.
McBride’s even dumber sidekick is Nick Swardson, who starred in the cult classic (actually, what’s the notch below cult classic?) “Grandma’s Boy” (2006), which I shamefully haven’t seen. I suspect “30 Minutes or Less” will be a cult classic (or the notch below) itself 10 years from now. It doesn’t have an obvious Hollywood pitch, and the humor falls in a range that is hard to quantify: It’s a dark comedy, definitely, but a lot of dark comedies with life-or-death premises are so violent that I don’t feel like laughing. This one has some violence, but it’s fairly brief and it comes at the end; “30 Minutes or Less” knows when to rein it in whereas, for example, “Pineapple Express” got carried away.
The dark humor here comes more from just sticking a camera on McBride and having him ad lib, like when he makes a crude metaphor about a sexual act then bluntly explains what he means. Or Ansari wanting to escape from the presence of Eisenberg because he might blow up at any minute, then laboriously explaining that he can’t leave him due to the guilt he would feel years down the road if his friend exploded. Also, I liked the fact that Eisenberg has a thing for Ansari’s sister (Dilshad Vadsaria) — who, to take the joke a step further — is not merely his sister, but his twin sister; you can probably imagine the awkward, sexually themed conversation that sprouts from that.
“30 Minutes” continues this summer’s winning streak for Hollywood comedies, but it’s actually a relatively subtle entry when you consider the blunt bedroom and bathroom humor of “The Change-Up,” “Horrible Bosses,” “Bad Teacher” and “The Hangover Part II.” In “30 Minutes,” there aren’t any high-concept shocking scenes like in those movies. Instead, we get plenty of casual, explicit references to things that used to be taboo in movies — mostly from McBride’s character, natch.
In a way, “30 Minutes” builds on all those movies and brings us to a point where nothing is so crude or daring that we’re shocked. Whereas Jennifer Aniston giving her boss the finger in “Office Space” 12 years ago was a cathartic “wow” moment, Eisenberg doing the same to his boss in “30 Minutes” is just one expected, frantic scene in a frenetic movie; after an overly long setup where McBride outlines the scheme to Eisenberg, while also terrifying him, the film hits a brisk, enjoyable stride.
For all its craziness, this movie does follow a fairly expected course for a heist movie, and in some ways that’s a good thing. Eisenberg and Ansari (basically playing Tom Haverford with more swearing) are predictably bad at robbing a bank, but I loved the fact that they are such good guys that there’s no way they could be good bank robbers.
A lot of the characterization comes simply because we already know Eisenberg’s, Ansari’s, McBride’s and — to a lesser extent — Swardson’s characters from previous films. “30 Minutes or Less” was obviously made for these four actors, and that helps the material immensely.