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30 MINUTES OR LESS While I've seen worse comedies this year, I haven't sat through any as unpleasant as 30 Minutes or Less. Never mind that newbie screenwriters Michael Diliberti and Matthew Sullivan loosely based their script on a real-life incident that ended in death (their claims to the contrary are blatant lies); if there's one thing we've learned from a century-plus of cinema, it's that just about any subject can explored for potential humor if the right people are involved. But in the case of 30 Minutes or Less, the right people must have been off making another movie. A shrill, clumsy film that has no idea how to orchestrate its black-comedy maneuvers, this finds Jesse Eisenberg cast as Nick, a pizza delivery man who's kidnapped by two grade-A doofuses, Dwayne (Danny McBride) and Travis (Nick Swardson). Needing $100,000 in a jiffy, the pair strap a bomb to Nick and inform him that he must rob a bank or else the device will explode. A frantic Nick gets his best friend Chet (Aziz Ansari) to participate, but matters only get more hectic, not less, in the aftermath of the heist. Eisenberg fares best simply by not straying far from his patented persona (The Social Network star even gets off a joke about Facebook), but whoever thought that casting three irritants like McBride, Swardson and Ansari in the same film was a good idea clearly has a much higher threshold for obnoxious behavior than I do. The shocking story behind this largely laughless endeavor is that it was directed by Ruben Fleischer, who previously teamed with Eisenberg on the wild and witty Zombieland. But while that engaging effort brought new life to the zombie flick, this one is strictly dead on arrival. *1/2
WARRIOR Perhaps because it's being released less than a year after The Fighter, Warrior has already been relentlessly compared to that drama which likewise focuses on two brothers involved with a pounding sport (boxing there, mixed martial arts here). I had problems with The Fighter (starting with Melissa Leo's canvas-chewing performance, which inexplicably won her an Oscar), but on balance, I have more with Warrior, which does a nice job of mostly subverting the inevitable genre clichés but has trouble coming up with anything new to fill the void. Tom Hardy and Joel Edgerton play the slugging siblings: Hardy's Tommy Conlon is a former Marine who's battling all manner of personal demons, while Edgerton's Brendan is a teacher who's forced back into the ring in order to make money and prevent foreclosure on his home. Both have their eyes on winning the championship, but first, they need to undergo the proper training and then beat a formidable slate of opponents if they expect to make it to the final match. Director-cowriter Gavin O'Connor and team ably set up the dire circumstances that blanket these men's lives, particularly their relationship with their estranged father Paddy (Nick Nolte, simply superb). But because we know exactly which two characters will end up in the championship bout (despite the challenge of a hulking Russian straight out of Rocky IV), the home stretch occasionally becomes tedious, with the emphasis shifting from character development to repetitive slugfests. Worse, Hardy and Edgerton barely have any scenes together, which drains their climactic confrontation of much of its power. I suspect many men will nevertheless tear up at the end, but if this is supposed to be the successor to Brian's Song, it's slightly off-key. **1/2
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