Losers and Winners

It’s perfect coincidence that the comedy 30 Minutes or
Less opens the same week as Spike Jonze’s
music video for the controversial Jay-Z and Kanye West song “Otis” is released.
Together they usefully gauge how Americans judge behavior, success and the
mixed-up values of post-9/11 masculinity.

When pizza delivery boy Nick (Jesse Eisenberg) is kidnapped,
strapped into a suicide-bomb jacket and forced to rob a bank by the
criminal-minded Dwayne (Danny McBride), their collision satirizes a real-life
incident of working-class anger. The Grand Rapids, Mich., setting is right for
its landscape of fast-food joints, dollar stores, unemployment and militia-mad
frustrations. It resembles the almost abstract, alley-like backdrop against
which Jay-Z and Kanye dress down, yet boast about their success. Jonze
brilliantly keeps the bling off-screen but the American flag in sight. The
point being: The avarice and acquisitiveness in his pop stars’ heads now occupy
the unconscious of the recession’s deprived masses, a demography tantalized by
the luxe of others.

Inside the deliberate bad-taste humor of 30 Minutes or
Less (based on a mom-and-pop franchise business
venture’s promise to deliver gratification hot!) is a satirical recognition
that the conditions of competition, greed and dissatisfaction have turned
Americans into homegrown, self-annihilating antagonists (terrorists). This
frustration is reflected in some critics’ hostile complaints that Jay-Z and
Kanye (let’s call them J&K) are insensitive to the plight of the pop
audience—as if the extravagant boasting of “Otis” was equal to S&P’s
downgraded rating of the U.S. economy.

Scolding pop critics miss that J&K have earned the right
to their braggadocio, and that it follows and fulfills a hip-hop tradition of
stating one’s aspiration and then glorying in its achievement. That’s what the
warring characters are after in 30 Minutes or Less—minus the hip-hop camaraderie. Danny McBride’s
specialty, white proletarian ambition carried to extremes of solipsistic
self-righteousness, casual racism, sexism and boorishness, has become an
unexpected mirror of the home truths that most mainstream pop culture disguises
through the distractions and dishonesty of reality TV shows. (Dwayne’s wisdom:
“Sometimes fate pulls out its big old cock and slaps you right in the face.”)
Our media’s constant competition for fame doesn’t make our culture more
egalitarian—rather the opposite.

That was the truth of Benny Boom’s Next Day Air, one of the decade’s best (and most
under-recognized) crime comedies. 30 Minutes or Less takes place in similar prole territory, which never
appears in films like The Hangover,
Crazy, Stupid, Love, Horrible
Bosses, The Change-Up and Bridesmaids, which all misrepresent the modern American landscape. The characters
in 30 Minutes or Less are a range
of working-class psychosis: Michael Peña’s ex-con hitman (“Mama said, ‘You‘re a
pimp!’”); Nick Swardson as Dwayne’s munitions expert sidekick; Fred Ward’s
grumpy, itchy-fingered war vet; and Aziz Ansari as Nick’s Indian best friend
Chet, who represents the vexed immigrant class who haven’t struck it rich.

Ansari also makes a cameo appearance in Jonze’s “Otis.” As
wingman to J&K, Ansari confirms the video’s satirical element. It is timely
casting, just like comedian Chris Tucker’s appearance, after the success of Friday and Rush Hour, in Hype Williams’ ultraflashy, magnificently spangly “Feel So Good”
in 1997—the ultimate bling-bling music video until Williams innovated Jay-Z’s
“Big Pimpin’.” The controversy surrounding “Big Pimpin’” questioned its sexist
equation of masculine power with feminine conquest. This irreducible gender
conflict flashes by in the bevy of light-skinned hotties in “Otis,” as well as
in Dwayne’s epithet (“Quiet down, Slumdog!”) to Chet’s sister Kate (Dilshad
Vasaria).

Sexism may be inseparable from the imperatives of male
aggression. 30 Minutes or Less ridicules
this; “Otis” is a more complex confession of the inordinate (impolite) desires
that our society inculcates and makes especially attractive to working-class
males. That’s the reality that critics of “Otis” don’t want to face, unless it
comes in nihilistic form like Sidney Lumet’s awful, blatant Before
the Devil Knows You’re Dead. In “Otis,”
there is subtlety in the aural reference to the soul music yearning of the
Civil Rights era, before the American Dream seemed readily graspable for black
American males. That’s why J&K rap about their sample of Otis Redding’s
1965 “Try a Little Tenderness,” “Sounds so soulful, don’t you agree?” Slyly,
they reach back to nostalgic standards of feeling.

Equally sly is Jonze’s visual slapstick deconstruction of a
Maybach luxury auto into a vehicle of eccentric progress. This appropriation, a
hip-hop form of Jonze’s punk anarchy, means as much as that gleaming white
yacht in “Big Pimpin’.” Director Ruben Fleischer unsubtly uses violence for
punch lines. His coarseness prevents 30 Minutes or Less from attaining the heights of Alex Cox’s Repo
Man and Repo Chick, but he slips in a line that makes this film worthy
of “Otis” when Nick is asked about the Internet and Eisenberg, star of The
Social Network, answers “You know I don’t
do Facebook, I’m off the grid.” That’s not hypocrisy; like J&K in “Otis,”
it’s a social reality we need to recover.

30 Minutes or Less

Directed by Reuben Fleischer

Running time: 83 min.