30 Minutes or Less
Directed By: Ruben Fleischer
Written By: Michael Diliberti, from a story by Diliberti and Matthew Sullivan
Starring: Jesse Eisenberg, Aziz Ansari, Danny McBride, Nick Swarsdon, Fred Ward, and Michael Pena.
Director of Photography: Jess Hall, Editor: Alan Baumgarten, Production Designer: Maher Ahmad, Original Music: Theodore Shapiro
Rated: R for rude language and ruder violence.
Having a bomb with a timer in a movie is always a great idea. It gives your characters not only a motivation to keep moving, but moving quickly. What? Moments of pathos? Forget that—there’s a bomb in a room and there’s no time for such moments. We gotta take care of this thing before it explores!
But 30 Minutes or Less, the final R-rated comedy of the summer (one of six!), could take some time to slow down. This is a rare thing to say about comedy as well, as too many comedies these days believe they can run for over two hours, when a lean 90 minutes would suit them better. But not for this flick, which runs just over 80 minutes. Director Ruben Fleischer showed a lot of promise with his debut flick Zombieland, which combined an end of the world apocalypse with a rag tag road movie, squeezing that perfect tone between ridiculous and irreverent blood and guts with genuine character moments.
