30 Minutes or Less

Impressions before seeing it
The trailers looked like fun and I liked the people involved.

How was it?
It's a shame that this movie seemed to bomb at the box office and then sneak under the radar, because I thought it was really funny. Supposedly there were a lot of improvised jokes from the cast (the four guys in the poster plus Michael Peña), so most of the laughs just come out of the dialogue, and the action part of the movie is mostly allowed to be action rather than slapstick. I think 30 Minutes or Less gets a lot of mileage out of splitting the main four characters into two duos who play well off each other: Eisenberg with Ansari and McBride with Swardson. I already enjoy him on Parks and Recreation, but Ansari has a certain energy about him that always gives him a fun screen presence, and Eisenberg has bothered me in the past due to a history of playing characters with an air of pretense to them, but as an average pizza delivery guy he was toned down here to someone much more bearable for me. As for McBride and Swardson, they were basically just playing Kenny and Stevie from Eastbound and Down, something fans of that show shouldn't have a problem with.

I know in my last few posts I've been mentioning some things I like seeing, and another one for the list is that I enjoy characters trying to deal with a really, really big problem, and watching them trying to process what's happening and come up with a plan. So I loved the scenes with Ansari and Eisenberg freaking out over the bomb strapped to the latter's chest. McBride and Swardson's scenes were enjoyable simply because their characters are idiots and conversations between them were always funny. One complaint I have is that this movie tries to shoehorn in a small romantic subplot, but it's not fleshed out enough to genuinely raise the stakes in the climax as it was intended to do. I don't think there was actually any point where I worried for a character's life, and that's a problem. I mean I liked the characters, but mostly just because they were funny; they didn't give me enough of a reason to seriously care about them.

Recommendation
If you're sick of comedies with heart or a message then this might be one for you, because 30 Minutes or Less is just funny, entertaining fluff and nothing else. It does rely on the comedic senses of its actors though, so if you don't find any of those guys funny then there's probably nothing for you here.