30 Minutes or Less (2011)

There's nothing nice about 30 Minutes or Less. It's got no redeeming social value. It just ticks away, exploding all notions of where you think it's going to go. It blew me sideways.

At barely 80 minutes, the film seems like a slight little adventure, but Fleischer fleshes out his twists and turns to make it feel like a fully-rendered story.

There's too much cheese, but there are still enough amusing action beats and funny one-liners to let one say, 30 Minutes or Less delivers, more or less on time.

It's hard to hate a movie that affectionately references the oeuvre of Kathryn Bigelow (both The Hurt Locker and Point Break!) and uses a whiny Third Eye Blind ballad as an acidic punch line.

"Less" has trouble framing simple action, yielding clumsy car chases that put the burden of generating excitement on the music and editing. As a result, pic looks cheap and feels clipped.