The good thing about being stuck a home with a baby is that I can finally start to catch up on my backlog of posts without having an opportunity to increase that backlog.

So today I am going to start with a movie review, the surprisingly decent 30 Minutes or Less.

Danny McBride is a somewhat polarising figure.  We know he can be funny (Pineapple Express) but we also know he can be annoyingly unfunny (Your Highness).  Now we know he can play nasty, stupid villain quite well too.

In the Ruben Fleischer-directed 30 Minutes or Less, he plays a scheming slacker who is after his father’s “fortune”, and together with his bumbling but  knowledgeable sidekick (Nick Swardson) come up with an unnecessary convoluted plan to get his hands on the money.  Without giving away too much more, that plan somehow involves putting under duress Jesse Eisenberg’s character Nick, an abused pizza delivery boy who works for a pizza joint that offers the titular “30 minutes or less” delivery policy (or you get your pizza free and the money comes out of the delivery boy’s wages).

Like many other McBride films, 30 Minutes or Less is highly sporadic, relies on sex jokes (though not as extreme or frequently as some of his other films) and is frankly a little hit and miss — that said, I did find it quite funny.  There was more plot than I had expected (which, for a McBride movie, doesn’t necessarily mean much), but what I think helped the film was the wonderfully talented comedic cast.

Jesse Eisenberg, coming off his performance as Mark Zuckerberg in The Social Network, isn’t overtly funny but does a great job as the straight man in this farce.  It’s similar to what he did in Zombieland, also a film directed by Ruben Fleischer.

Eisenberg allows the comedic talents of the other actors to shine through, in particular his best friend, Indian-American comedian  Aziz Ansari, who has some ripper lines and, for lack of a better expression, a funny face.  Another, who almost steals the show, is Michael Pena, who is utterly hilarious as an assassin.  Fred Ward, who plays McBride’s domineering father, is pretty good as well.

I guess it depends on your tolerance level for jokes based on stupidity and crudeness.  For me, 30 Minutes or Less pressed my buttons but didn’t cross my threshold, which is why I thought it was one of the better comedies of the year.

3.5 stars out of 5!