30 Minutes or Less (Saturday, August 13, 2011) (68)

The title of Ruben Fleischer's 30 Minutes or Less comes from the fact that the main character, Nick (Jesse Eisenberg), works for a pizza delivery place that has one of those deals where if you don't get your pizza in 30 minutes you don't pay for it. Considering the plot of the film involves a bomb/kidnapping, you'd expect some sort of "you-have-30-minutes-before-the-bomb-goes-off" sorta thing, but, alas, writer Michael Diliberti apparently isn't that clever.

Nothing about this film is clever or particularly funny. Nick and his best friend Chet (Aziz Ansari) are fighting over their past jerky behavior and the fact that Nick slept with Chet's sister, Kate (Dilshad Vadsaria) (which, of course, is totally uncool, brah). Meanwhile across town (this town is Grand Rapids, Michigan, home of great tax-free filmmaking!), losers Dwayne (Danny McBride) and Travis (Nick Swardson) are trying to kill Dwayne's dad (Fred Ward) so he can inherit the lottery money he won a few years ago.

Their dumb plan involves them ordering a pizza from Nick's place, kidnapping him and strapping a bomb to his chest, then forcing him to go rob a bank. Oh-kaaay. Nick has to enlist the help of Chet to rob the bank and save his butt.

There are a bunch of moments here where you presume what you're hearing was written as comedy, but none of it is very funny. The plot is stupid in the worst banal way and the acting all around is wooden (and I'm a big fan of Zucker- ... uh, I mean Eisenberg and McBride). Ansari's style is to normally rather monotone with punctuations of high-pitched shrieks; that's normally funny, but here it just comes off as line-reading and uninspired.

This movie is a bomb.

Stars: .5 of 4