Sunday, June 10, 2012

Movie review - "30 Minutes or Less" (2011) **

Disappointing follow up from the team that made Zombieland despite an excellent cast. A minor fault is you never think the comic crook duo of Danny McBride and Nick Swardson are a genuine threat; a more major one is that I never bought why Jesse Eisenberg do the robbery. There were too many opportunities for him to call the police or army or someone, anyone. And the fact is they steal an innocent person's car and trash it and rob a bank and scare the hell out of people (even when Eisenberg is delivering pizzas he's running red lights, smoking cones behind the wheel and driving on footpaths). It takes a lot of fun out of it. Why didn't they have the female lead kidnapped at the 30 minute mark instead of waiting until the last act? It would have made it all make sense.

There is fun to be had - some of the lines are hilarious, the lead actors are all very talented (I hope Aziz Ansari becomes  film star). But they all feel like ad-libbed bits thrown in by the actors - the actual story itself is a lot of not particularly involving plot and noisy action. The female lead is completely under-developed (it would have been a better film had this been beefed up say like Emma Stone in Zombieland). It seems like everyone had a good time making it.

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