Sloppy slackers: Bomb-com suffers from uneven pacing, miscast star - Entertainment, Movies - Navy Times

Sloppy slackers: Bomb-com suffers from uneven pacing, miscast star

If this has indeed been The Summer of the R-Rated Comedy, with each new movie striving to one-up its predecessors in getting down and dirty, then we’re going out with a whimper with “30 Minutes or Less.” And that’s ironic, given that the movie is all about something — or someone — going out with a bang.

From the phoned-in (“The Hangover Part II”) to the fantastic (“Bridesmaids”), “30 Minutes or Less” falls somewhere in the mushy midsection. Like “Horrible Bosses,” it’s got a shaggy, sloppy vibe and characters who are in way over their heads, but it’s not nearly as consistently funny. It’s actually got more in common with the “The Change-Up” in that it’s frustratingly uneven, despite some appealing moments of buddy camaraderie.

Jesse Eisenberg leads the idiocy — and that’s part of the problem. Eisenberg is at his best when he’s the smartest guy in the room, when he’s struggling to stifle his inability to suffer fools, as in his Oscar-nominated performance in “The Social Network” or even in films that have allowed him to show some more insecurity, like “The Squid and the Whale” or “Zombieland” (which, like “30 Minutes or Less,” came from director Ruben Fleischer).

Here, he’s one of the fools himself as Nick, a slacker/stoner/pizza delivery guy whose only ambition in life is to get an order to its destination in a half-hour or less, hence the title. Not that punctuality is a source of pride for him; rather, if he doesn’t make it in time, the customer gets the pizza for free and the cost comes out of his paycheck. His best friend, Chet (Aziz Ansari), is vaguely more useful in that he’s an elementary school teacher, but he’s still sort of a goof-off (which calls to mind yet another of the summer’s R-rated comedies, “Bad Teacher”).

The other pair of pals in “30 Minutes or Less” consists of the flat-out doofuses played by Danny McBride and Nick Swardson. McBride’s Dwayne hates his disdainful Marine father (Fred Ward) and dreams of proving himself by opening a tanning salon that’s a front for a brothel. With some inspiration from a stripper named Juicy (Bianca Kajlich) and some help from Swardson’s worshipful Travis, who’s obsessed with explosive devices, Dwayne cooks up a scheme to kill his dad and thereby inherit the old man’s millions in lottery winnings.

It almost feels as though “30 Minutes or Less” was constructed from a random assortment of wild and raunchy ideas: words on note cards such as “hooker,” “stripper,” “gay slurs,” “flamethrower,” “adultery with a lifeguard” and “fellatio in a car.” It feels way longer than its brief running time, not just because of its stop-and-start pacing but also because it looks so drab and dingy, it’s really unpleasant to watch.