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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It didn’t seem to bode well for the movie, when in the first trailer for Your Highness, the centerpiece joke was a guy falling down.  The red-band trailer was a huge improvement, but even in that, Natalie Portman’s butt sort of stole the show.  You can hardly blame them, she’s an Oscar winner.  If I made a movie with Meryl Streep’s bush in it, it wouldn’t matter what it was about, Meryl Streep’s bush would be the selling point.  Maybe even the name of my first born.  In any case, early word is that Your Highness does indeed have stuff besides Natalie Portman’s butt in it, and 85% of that stuff is cow boners.   As Danny McBride recently told Opie and Anthony:

“We have a minotaur hard-on in the film.  …And it’s full hard.  There is a rape scene with a minotaur and a man.  You see the minotaur… get his sh*t going.  You apparently can’t show a male hard-on, but since this was a minotaur, we said it was the bull which was getting turned on.  Because the bull is the bottom half.  You can get away with that if it’s creature hard-ons.”

I’ve admitted this before, but one of my ultimate guilty pleasure movies is Freddy Got Fingered, which probably has a lot to do with seeing it when I was really high.  And of course the signature scene in that film is Tom Green holding up an erect horse penis shouting, “Daddy, I’m a farmer!”  I guess what I’m trying to say is that if your film has big erect farm animal penises, my only question is where to buy popcorn.  Wow, you can practically hear my graduate school professors beaming with pride right now.

[thanks to Robopanda for the tip]

MSN has debuted the new red-band trailer for Your Highness (watch it after the jump), starring Danny McBride, Zooey Deschanel, James Franco, and Natalie Portman’s butt.  You’ll definitely want to watch the red-band version, because in the regular, green-band version, Natalie Portman’s medieval thong (see links at left) has been altered, nay, CENSORED, too look like this:

(*cleans monocle, does spit take*) Whaaa? Did they shoot this scene twice with two different bikinis?  Was she digitally de-thonged? If so, how’d they’d decide who got the job of post-production full-butt bikini supervisor?  And if they shot it twice, was there a sexy costume designer around to supervise during the wardrobe change?  I mean, someone would have to monitor it, for continuity, right?  The point is, I’m intrigued.  And now, farbeit from me to diss Natalie Portman’s butt, because, as a blogger, Natalie Portman’s butt puts food in my mouth, but… well, it could be meatier.  I’m just sayin.

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