30 MINUTES OR LESS
US, 2011, 90 minutes, Colour.
Jesse Eisenberg, Danny Mc Bride, Asis Azari, Michael Pena.
Directed by Ruben Fleischer.
There is no major reason for seeing this film. Actually, there is no minor reason either. The director made the entertaining vampire spoof, Zombieland. There is a Zombieland of a different ilk. Most of the characters are living dead, each in their own way.
It would be interesting to sit down with the director to ask him why he made the film as he did. He would probably say that it was a lot of fun. Maybe, he was right about the basic plot idea. But, it is the screenplay which causes a lot of the problems. Sometimes, with the amount of crass language found in a film, a comment is made that with the cutting of all the four letter words, the film would be half its running time. This is the case here, four letter alternatives to witty or clever writing. The other question for the director – and he can always pass the responsibility on to the writers – is that why the four main characters have to be so gross about sexuality – and for so much of the time. If a visitor from Mars were to see this film as the first cinema experience and think it was typical of the human race, the alien would have no reason for thinking these were creatures who needed to be saved from invasion! Men would seem to be sexist yobs.
Danny Mc Bride is a comedian who has capitalised on this kind of explicit sexual reference (no innuendo here, just plain smut and beyond) in such films as Your Highness. He now plays a character who exhibits no redeeming features at all, completely dislikeable. His dumb friend is little better. Mc Bride portrays a stoner-loafer who resents his father (Fred Ward), a military man who has won millions in a lottery and is frittering it away. His son wants to get it and connives with a pole dancer, who promises to find a hit-man, to kill his father. But, the charge his $100,000. His brainwave is to pressure a slacker, he and his friends wearing monkey masks without any sense of irony of what this could mean) who works at a pizza place whose boast is that if it is not delivered within 30 minutes, you get the pizza free.
Jesse Eisenberg (so effective as Mark Zuckerberg in The Social Contract) is abducted, a bomb strapped on him and given a day to rob a bank and deliver the money. He involves his friend, Aziz Asari (and they both have a propensity for language and sex talk at the slightest opportunity) and, in farcical fashion, they get the job done. Also involved is the hired killer (Michael Pena), which complicates the proceedings no end.
Had the writers stayed with the spoofy absurd plot, it may have had its comic moments. However, they didn’t and this is what they have ended up with. Time to move on to another film for all concerned.
