Director Ruben Fleischer (“Zombieland”) and screenwriter Michael Diliberti deliver all the fun of watching two dumb-asses in apesuits screw up a get-rich caper of locking a bomb vest on a pizza-delivery guy (Jesse Eisenberg) to make him rob a bank so they can hire a hitman to kill a lottery-winner and inherit enough to open a tanning studio to front a prostitution operation. Set and shot in Grand Rapids, “30 Minutes or Less” is a good-buddy, bad-buddy deal that’s put together with enough smart lines, including one about “The Hurt Locker” on a Netflix queue, and clever plot complications, to set it apart from the run of dumber action-comedies. Fleischer claims the script grafted the likes of John Landis and the Coen Brothers. His hybrid yields a half bushel of late summer laughs. With Danny McBride, Aziz Ansari, Nick Swardson, Dilshad Vadsaria, Bianca Kajlich, Michael Peña, Fred Ward. 87m. (Bill Stamets)
Ray Pride is Newcity’s film critic and a contributing editor to Filmmaker magazine.
His history of Chicago “Ghost Signs” in words and images will be published in Spring 2022.
Previews of that project on Twitter (twitter.com/chighostsigns) as well as photography on Instagram: instagram.com/raypride.
Twitter: twitter.com/RayPride
