30 Minutes or Less is high concept, the kind that makes for a compelling trailer. There’s tons of funny moments in this movie and two highly likable lead characters Nick (Jesse Eisenberg) and Chet (Aziz Ansari), and it’s a an example of an exceptional pitch. It’s also an example of unfortunate choices made when developing a pitch into a screenplay.
Conceptually the trailer tells it all: a pizza delivery boy is fitted with a bomb vest and forced to rob a bank or else he’ll explode. The first problem is that the overall movie compartmentalizes that story into a bigger, significantly less interesting story.
Dwayne (Danny McBride), the protagonist, wants to kill his father, and everyone in the movie is a pawn in his ridiculous scheme. Nick, the main character, has avoidance issues that are keeping him in a dead end job and prevent him from making a move on the woman he loves. When Nick has a bomb strapped to himself and his life span reduced to an upper time limit of 10 hours, he can no longer avoid doing the things he’s put off for years. (You may note this is a good example of a screenplay where the protagonist and main character are two separate characters.)
The movie starts out by laying pipe to set up Dwayne’s plan to kill his father for a multi-million inheritance. So Dwayne becomes the protagonist of the picture, rather than what could have been a more dimensional story and role for Nick. The biggest omission in the story is the lack of a clear antagonist to Dwayne’s plot to kill his father. In a sense, Nick indirectly becomes the antagonist by the end of the story, but this misdirected conflict dilutes an otherwise solid concept.
By splitting the audience’s attention between these two characters, and failing to adhere to a tighter story structure, the writer avoids making a crucial choice and we don’t get the same story experience. But we’ll have to forgive this because the movie was still a lot of fun.
