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30 Minutes or Less: decades late, still fresh enough not to bomb

Don’t let the cheesy (with ham) title fool you.30 Minutes or Less sounds like cinematic fast food, with its pizza-delivery connotations, but it actually serves something more substantial.
Jesse Eisenberg, Aziz Ansari
Aziz Ansari


30 Minutes or Less

Two and a half stars (out of four)

Rated: 14A

Don’t let the cheesy (with ham) title fool you.

30 Minutes or Less sounds like cinematic fast food, with its pizza-delivery connotations, but it actually serves something more substantial.

Not a whole lot more substantial, mind you, and certainly nothing terribly wholesome. This reunion of Zombieland director Ruben Fleischer and actor Jesse Eisenberg is a “hard R” comedy, with all the profanity and crudeness that implies.

But in a year lousy with badly written movies filled with phallic fixations, it’s a relief to watch one that is happy to be rude good fun without excessive raunch.

It feels like a throwback to comedies of the 1980s or even ’70s, with a caper plot involving a $100,000 bank heist — and since when was that considered a lot of money, in movie terms?

A chase scene enlivened by Glenn Frey’s The Heat is On, lifted from the 1984 Eddie Murphy laugher Beverly Hills Cop, contributes to the retro mood.

Eisenberg once again plays the put-upon nerd and co-star Danny McBride the grasping yokel. But there’s just enough novelty this time to make it interesting and amusing.

Eisenberg’s pizza hustler Nick has the curdled disposition of an intelligent man forced to stupid things.

Risking life and limb in his beat-up Mustang, he roars through Grand Rapids, Mich., seeking to avoid losing dough if his pizza fails to rise to that half-hour-or-less delivery challenge.

McBride’s slacker schemer Dwayne similarly brings greater intensity to his usual idiocy.

A layabout with dreams bigger than his expanding waistline, he wants the lottery money won by his ex-Marines father (Fred Ward), and he’s not prepared to wait until he inherits it through natural causes.

Dwayne schemes with a local lap dancer (Bianca Kajlich) to hasten the inheritance process by hiring a hit man to whack his pa.

But the job will cost $100,000, and to get the money he hatches a robbery plan with his pal Travis (Nick Swardson) to strap a bomb to an obedient loser: get the loot for us or go kaboom!

Hapless Nick just happens to roar in to this scenario, just in time to be knocked out and bombed up by Dwayne and Travis.

But no plan this nutty can possibly go smoothly, and as they wait for Nick to do the bank job, aided by his skeptical buddy Chet (Aziz Ansari), our would-be robbers and whackers hit a few snags.

First-time screenwriter Michael Diliberti doesn’t exactly strike comic gold, but he scratches up enough silver for reasonable compensation.

He and director Fleischer both enjoy playing with genre stereotypes, and the actors are all more than game — including Dilshad Vadsaria as the unlikely love interest and Michael Peña as a pimp who needs to convince himself he’s tough.

The movie clocks in at a brisk 82 minutes, which is just long enough to tell the story and short enough to keep us laughing.

It even manages to put in jokes about The Social Network for Eisenberg and Your Highness for McBride, the most recent films for both men.

Fleischer and Diliberti obviously like going to the movies, as well as making them, and that’s a pizza all right.

Peter Howell is a syndicated Toronto Star movie critic.