Funny High School Movie Pizza Delivery Fantasy Scene Gay
Kernel Rating (out of 5): 
Length: 83 minutes
MPAA Rating: R
Age Appropriate for: 15+. If your teenager can handle a bunch of cursing, then they can basically handle anything in "30 Minutes or Less." There's also some talk about sex, a scene in a strip club with some bare breasts and various scenes of violence — a few gunshot wounds, and the excessive use of a flamethrower on human flesh — but overall the whole thing is too goofy to be truly offensive.
Dumb comedies of summer, meet your geeky, silly spawn: '30 Minutes or Less' is a roundhouse kick of absurdity that revels in its own enjoyable implausibility. Plus, Aziz Ansari!
By Roxana Hadadi
Right at the end of the credits for "30 Minutes or Less," director Ruben Fleischer and writers Michael Diliberti and Matthew Sullivan make sure to tell us that this film wasn't based on any actual events, and any similarity between its characters and real people is purely coincidental. They're totally liars.
"30 Minutes or Less" is about a pizza delivery guy who gets a bomb strapped to him by some bad guys who then force him to rob a bank, which completely mimics the death of Brian Douglas Wells, a pizza delivery man who was killed in 2003 when a bomb placed around his neck exploded — but oh well. Such is pop culture.
What happened to Wells was of course tragic, and his remaining family members are probably still suffering, since the government in a July 2007 indictment decided Wells was a conspirator in the bank robbery. But it's an unfortunate truth that Hollywood gets ideas from anywhere and anything, and while Wells's family has told The Huffington Post they're not happy with a story somewhat similar to his being marketed as a R-rated comedy, it's also been copied in various TV dramas like "Criminal Minds" and "Law and Order: Criminal Intent." That's just the way the machine works.
So Steve Elzer, senior vice president of Sony Pictures' Columbia TriStar Motion Picture Group, in a statement to The Huffington Post said writers Diliberti and Sullivan were "vaguely familiar with what had occurred and wrote an original screenplay that does not mirror the real-life tragedy," and he's right. "30 Minutes or Less" is about a pizza guy who is lured out into the middle of nowhere, drugged and then wakes up with a bomb attached to his chest, forced to rob a bank, but the movie's absurd subplots and improv-style dialogue cement it purely in comedy territory. It doesn't attempt to recreate what happened to Wells, and it doesn't disservice his memory by making the character with the bomb strapped to him seem like an idiot or a bad guy.
Instead, Nick (Jesse Eisenberg) is just an average dude. Years after graduating from high school with his best friend Chet (Aziz Ansari), he's still delivering pizzas — if he gets there later than 30 minutes after you place your order, the meal is free! — and constantly watching "Die Hard," with a refrigerator full of mostly beer. Chet, now a full-time substitute teacher, urges Nick to do something more with his life, but he's not sure what; the only things that seem to matter are one-upping kids who to try to trick him into giving them pizza for free, playing video games and pining after Chet's twin sister, Kate (Dilshad Vadsaria), who Nick has loved for years.
Things get more serious, of course, when Nick crosses paths with burgeoning criminals — and profound nitwits — Dwayne (Danny McBride) and Travis (Nick Swardson). Dwayne's dream is to run a tanning salon as a front for a prostitution ring, in order to make easy money that he could shove in the face of his father, The Major (Fred Ward), who flaunts his wealth from a $10 million lottery win. So when stripper Juicy (Bianca Kajlich) suggests Dwayne hire her boyfriend Chango (Michael Peña) to kill his father for $100,000, Dwayne decides he and Travis should make a bomb, strap it on some unsuspecting citizen and force him to rob a bank for them.
And so Nick gets strapped into a vest with a bomb attached to it, Dwayne and Travis follow him to make sure he gets their money within a nine-hour window, Chet gets roped into the scenario because Nick needs his help, and Chango gets increasingly frustrated as he has to wait for his money — and deal with Dwayne's and Travis's idiocy. They're really stupid, if that wasn't clear already.
With a bunch of physical humor and improvised dialogue (much of McBride's and Swardson's conversations were thought up on the fly, and Ansari seems to have brought some his standup character Randy into the mix, too), "30 Minutes or Less" speeds along. There's no wasted time here: Character development is established early on — it's clear Nick is a good, if unmotivated, guy, with strong relationships with both Chet and Kate — and McBride and Swardson work well as a clearly ridiculous pair (they're certainly better together than McBride was with James Franco in the insufferable "Your Highness"). Eisenberg and Ansari truly click as best friends who sometimes can't stand each other, and nearly every scene of theirs together — from Nick showing up at Chet's elementary school with the bomb strapped to his chest, or the two shopping at Family Dollar for bank robbery supplies — works because of Eisenberg's awkward charm and Ansari's smooth obnoxiousness.
Some things seem out of place, though: Peña is great as the overzealous gangster, but why did his character need such an absurd accent? Did The Major really need to make all those cracks about Dwayne's and Travis's relationship being gay? And while I love Ansari, I can get why some people think he just plays Randy or his character Tom from the TV show "Parks and Recreation," over and over again; his indignant cracks here are sometimes too similar to those other roles.
But still, "30 Minutes or Less" ends up above most of this summer's other R-rated comedies, being less sentimental than "The Change-Up" and less grating than "Bad Teacher." Fleischer —who previously directed "Zombieland," also starring Eisenberg — brings the same wittiness and outlandishness to "30 Minutes or Less," even if a few ingredients don't jive with the overall pie. See what I did there? Pizza joke!
Source: https://www.chesapeakefamily.com/movie-review-30-minutes-or-less-r/
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