30 Minutes or Less (2011)

30 Minutes or Less is the kind of lean, caffeinated comedy that doesn’t so much begin as detonate—an absurd, high-stakes setup delivered with Ruben Fleischer’s gift for momentum and snap. Jesse Eisenberg’s anxious motor-mouth energy plays beautifully off Danny McBride’s gloriously misguided menace, and the movie keeps finding fresh laughs in the panic without ever bogging down in explanation. It’s breezy, rude, and surprisingly charming in the way it turns a bad day into a runaway sprint, with set pieces that land like punchlines and punchlines that hit like action beats. Fair warning: the humor is aggressively profane and the violence is spiky, but if you’re in the mood for a short, fast, darkly comic ride, this one goes down like a shot.

30 Minutes or Less is clearly aiming for a frantic, R-rated “ordinary guy in an insane situation” comedy, mixing a ticking-clock crime plot with buddy banter and bursts of action. When it works, it’s because Jesse Eisenberg and Aziz Ansari bring some nervous energy and timing that keeps a few scenes moving. But the movie often feels like it’s sprinting without a plan: the characters are thin, the tone swings between cartoonish violence and crude jokes, and the whole thing can come off clumsy and oddly disjointed rather than tightly escalating. If you don’t enjoy constant profanity, mean-spirited humor, or the idea of a bomb-vest premise played for laughs, this probably won’t be your kind of “fun.”