Jesse Eisenberg’s performance in 30 Minutes or Less is like a mirror of something you’ve seen before in a movie you’ve seen before: As an unambiguously unambitious pizza-delivery guy who’s forced to rob a bank, is he riffling through the deck and pulling out the same old cards, perhaps in a slightly different order? Or is he adding subtle variations to a type of character he’s played many times previously, biding his time until he can get another role like the perfectly calibrated one he played in The Social Network?
It’s hard to tell with Eisenberg, who may be one of the most underwhelming good actors working today: Even when he wows us, as he did in The Social Network, he’s wowing us with a shrug. The shrug is there in 30 Minutes or Less, Ruben Fleischer’s follow-up to his exhilarating, sure-footed 2009 debut, Zombieland, but it’s a shrug without a country. Zombieland was a picture with a strong sense of place, a metaphorical call for compatriots to band together in tough times. 30 Minutes or Less is a crime farce that’s clever and funny in places, but mostly just shambling and crude. Eisenberg can’t quite find his place in it, and it’s easy to see why.
Eisenberg plays Nick, an alleged grown-up who hasn’t yet figured out how to make the grown-up thing work. His best friend, Chet (Aziz Ansari), pinpoints the problem succinctly: “You? An adult? You had a Lunchables for dinner last night.” Nick has some minor problems, including that dead-end pizza-delivery job,…
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After contributing scene-stealing but all-too-brief supporting turns in films like Observe & Report, I Love You, Man, and Funny People (“Raaaaandy!”), Aziz Ansari finally gets a full-on leading role in this week’s 30 Minutes or Less as Jesse Eisenberg’s straitlaced BFF/partner in crime, Chet. What took Hollywood so long to give Ansari, who’s currently between seasons stealing yet more scenes on Parks & Recreation, the screen time he deserves? According to Ansari, he’s just been paying his dues.
“You look at people like Steve Carell, Will Ferrell and all those guys,” Ansari explained to Movieline during a brief chat at San Diego’s Comic-Con last month, where he joined director Ruben Fleischer (Zombieland), and co-stars Nick Swardson and Michael Pena for the 30 Minutes or Less panel. “They all went through their periods of doing these smaller roles then eventually got their break doing a bigger role.”
[Read Movieline’s report from the set of 30 Minutes or Less here.]
Said role in 30 Minutes or Less pairs Ansari with Eisenberg as Chet and Nick, respectively, former school friends and semi-slackers forced to rob a bank for $100,000 by local criminals (Swardson and Danny McBride) who outfit Nick with a bomb vest as incentive. It’s the rare opportunity for Ansari to show a new side of his comic persona — still hilarious as ever, but much sweeter than the douche bag characters he’s been known for to date. Movieline spoke with Ansari in San Diego — in the thick of the chaotic, ubernerdy Comic-Con 2011 hustle and bustle — about making 30 Minutes or Less, following in the footsteps of fellow funnymen Will Ferrell and Steve Carell, and his upcoming…
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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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