Do these look like two guys about to rob a bank and possibly explode?

“Why did someone make this?” Sadly, that was the question on my mind almost from the first minute to the last during 30 Minutes or Less. I don’t understand why you’d take a lurid, darkly absurd tale of kidnappings, hitmen, and bomb vests and try to turn it into the most broad, bland, Borscht-belt schmucky chuckle fest possible. This movie is like watching Jay Leno tell pedophilia jokes, but less interesting. It’s not the LEAST funny movie I’ve ever seen (hello, Dinner for Schmucks), probably because you couldn’t make a totally unfunny movie with this cast if you tried, but you could tell this story was fundamentally flawed from the first five minutes.

Why did Ruben Fleischer want to tell this story, exactly? Because it seems like his interest wasn’t so much what people might do in these situations, but what jokes actors might make while wearing their costumes. Danny McBride and Nick Swardson come the closest (they’re supposed to be crazy, at least), but no one seems quite committed to the concept. Fleischer said in an interview that he wanted Fargo to be his point of reference, but “without any of the darkness” — which is actually 30 Minutes or Less‘s fatal flaw. It plays more like Family Guy, where the premise is just a planter box for interchangeable jokes about queefs and Emmanuel Lewis. Actually there weren’t any queef jokes. That would’ve been an improvement.

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30 Minutes or Less is a comedy from Zombieland director Ruben Fleischer, starring Jesse Eisenberg, Aziz Ansari, Danny McBride, and Nick Swardson, based on the real-life collar bomb case from 2003. In the real-life version, the bomber was actually part of the robbery plot, though he thought the bomb was going to be fake.  He tried to back out when he found out the explosives were real, but his accomplices forced him to wear it at gun point, and, in yet another strange turn, gave him a shotgun made out of a cane to use in the robbery. He was eventually caught by the cops and killed when his friends, afraid that he’d turn state’s witness against them, detonated the bomb while news cameras were rolling.

In theory, I like the idea of turning the story into a dark comedy, but based on the trailer, I’m not sure how seriously I can take the danger when the characters are making cheesy jokes about it the whole time.  It looks like they forgot the “dark” part.  Like, if me and my fat buddy were running from Nazis through the ghettos of Warsaw like Schindler’s List and dogs were nipping at my heels as he was taking too long to get over a fence, I doubt I’d be like, “Dammit, Herschel! I told you not to have that second knish!”

Opens August 12th.

Ruben Fleischer made his directorial debut with the 2009 zombie comedy Zombieland and his second effort, 30 Minutes or Less has a new red band trailer, and I think it may be safe to say that Ruben and I are going to be great friends.

Zombieland was a hit-or-miss film for most people that I know, but I loved it, and after watching this trailer I think it might be impossible to dislike 30 Minutes or Less, which is about a pizza delivery boy (Jesse Eisenberg) who is abducted by two men in monkey suits (Danny McBride and Nick Swardson) who strap a bomb vest to his chest and force him to rob a bank. His only recourse is to beg his friend (Aziz Ansari) for help…

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The Black List is a list of Hollywood’s best unproduced scripts as voted on by executives.  The projects are interesting not because most executives aren’t complete idiots, but because projects tend to be better when they start with an actual script, instead of some half-assed pitch like, “Hey, what about guinea-pig secret agents?”  Anyway, here’s an update on two:

Zombieland director Ruben Fleischer signed on to direct 30 Minutes or Less, a script by Matthew Sullivan and Michael Diliberti.  I wasn’t a huge fan of Zombieland, but I thought the visual style was very cool, and I was hoping his next project wouldn’t be stock characters in a stock premise again.  Now THR reports that Aziz Ansari in a story that… “revolves around a junior high history teacher (Ansari) and a pizza-delivery man who are forced to rob a bank when one of them is strapped to a bomb vest.”  ThePlaylist has more details on the plot, though they warn it’s “spoilery”.  Meanwhile, Danny McBride is in talks to co-star as Ansari’s straitlaced University classics professor.  Ha, just kidding, he’ll play a “white trash goon.”  In honor of that, here’s a Tweet from KF*ckingP: “Doing free pap smears today on Miami Beach to raise money for Haiti. Let’s get our troops home!”  There’s so much right with that.

Rob Corddry will sculpt your butter for Obama.  In Butter, a script by Jason Micalleff ,Rob Corddry will stir Jim Carrey’s vanilla, stepping into a role he turned down, of a former butter-sculpting champion whose wife (Jennifer Garner) is the heir apparent to win this year’s title, only to be thwarted by a young black girl.  The whole thing is said to be a satire of the 2008 Iowa democratic caucus (the black girl is Obama, Jennifer Garner is Hillary).  Box-office toilet poison Kate Hudson is also signed to star, presumably as a stand in for Sarah Palin, the chick that ruins everything for everyone.  [via LATimesblog]

I’ve only just starting warming up to Raaaaaaandy, Aziz Ansari’s ‘bad comedian’ character, but if you believe Judd Apatow, they’re already talking giving Raaaaaaandy his own movie. And if anyone has the clout to actually make that happen, it’s Judd Apatow. Said the man in an interview with JoBlo:

“Randy isn’t in [Funny People] anywhere near as much we wish he was. Something hilariously magical happened when Aziz showed up. So we all said, ‘What else can we do?’ Let’s just make a documentary! We just couldn’t stop writing for him. And now we’re talking about making the RANDY movie. We can’t get enough of Randy…”
Though he was laughing, he definitely wasn’t joking about a RANDY movie later adding, “we’re outlining it right now.”

I didn’t like this character at all at first but he’s grown on me a lot since then, so maybe by the time this comes out it’ll actually sound like a good idea (it already sounds better than MacGruber).  But if it’s “hilariously magical” you’re after, you should’ve seen time my friend pantsed Criss Angel and then I socked him in the belly. Tada!  His mascara runs when he cries.