In Ruben Fleischer’s upcoming comedy 30 Minutes or Less, Jesse Eisenberg plays a pizza delivery man coerced into robbing a bank by two thugs (Danny McBride and Nick Swardson) who strap a bomb to his chest and threaten to detonate him. Comedy ensues, of course, but the real-life 2003 event that loosely inspired the film didn’t end so hilariously, as the family of late Pennsylvania pizza man Brian Wells would like to point out.
Wells’s story has unsettling parallels in the film, in which McBride plots to have his father killed for his inheritance and forces Eisenberg’s pizza boy to rob a bank in order to fund the operation: According to reports, on August 28, 2003, Erie, PA resident Wells, who worked part time delivering pizzas for Mama Mia Pizzeria, met with accomplices in a pre-meditated plot to rob an area bank using a fake bomb collar as a prop so he could feign innocence if caught; unbeknownst to Wells, his colleagues planned to strap an actual bomb to him, forcing him to chase a series of clues in hopes of defusing it in time. (Wells’s family maintains that he was an innocent victim in the plot.)
Wells entered Erie’s PNC Bank and demanded $250,000, only getting $8,000. He then began frantically chasing down the clues that would release him from his bomb, left under rocks by his accomplices around town. When the police caught up to him, Wells pleaded for help removing the device. Less than an hour after he’d been strapped to the bomb it detonated, killing Wells.
Understandably, Wells’s surviving family members have voiced their objections to…
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