#two-star

★★☆☆☆

Directed by: Guy Ritchie

Written by: Ivan Atkinson, Marn Davies, and Guy Ritchie

The Covenant has the pastiche and air of a "based on the true story" war film, although it is an original story that dramatizes some legitimate issues faced by Afghans who served as interpreters for the US military during the two-decade long war in Afghanistan. The plot follows Sergeant John Kinley (played a bit unevenly by Jake Gyllenhaal) and his squad of soldiers as they fruitlessly search for locations where the Taliban may be manufacturing or storing explosive devices. When their interpreter is killed in a bomb attack (that's not a spoiler, it happens in the first five minutes of the film), Kinley's squad is assigned a replacement named Ahmed (Dar Salim in a standout, potentially star-making performance).

With Ahmed's help and some unconventional tactics, Kinley and his squad close in on a legitimate IED factory. But when they arrive, one of the workers notifies the local Taliban leaders of the Americans' presence and discovery of their stash. As the Taliban close in, Kinley's squad is picked apart and Kinley and Ahmed are separated from everyone, ultimately forced to flee on foot. What follows is a very protracted chase sequence culminating in Kinley being seriously wounded. Ahmed bandages the sergeant up and starts off to drag, carry, and care for Kinley across over 100 kilometers of Taliban-controlled territory.

Eventually Ahmed is successful in saving Kinley, who wakes up weeks later in the hospital. Once back home in the States, Kinley is haunted by grief and remorse once he learns that Ahmed has been forced into hiding for his actions, becoming something of an anti-Taliban folk hero. The third act of the movie is then an extended rescue mission where Kinley returns to Afghanistan in an attempt to locate and extract Ahmed and his family to the US.

It's sort of an interesting structure for this particular story. I think a lot of screenwriters (or perhaps editors) would typically focus on a more protracted third act and either deal with Ahmed's perilous journey in flashbacks or intersperse it throughout Kinley's rescue mission. Here, though, the events are depicted linearly which puts the bulk of the film's runtime on the second act. It's a pretty great second act, to be sure, full of high stakes escapes, and a truly exhausting level of heightened tension. This is where Dar Salim truly shines and his character is displayed through a handful of dialogue-free actions and pivotal decision points.

The bridge between this sequence and Kinley's decision to return to try and save Ahmed is where the film broke down for me. Gyllenhaal's wooden stoicism from the first act is replaced by a see-saw between extra wooden and over-the-top ham as he rages against the system dragging their feet about securing Ahmed's immigration visa. I get that he was going for a PTSD effect and perhaps the editors did him no favors, but it just didn't work for me. There are a few other odd choices in this section as well: Johnny Lee Miller's Colonel Vokes is hinted at having a deeper backstory connection with Kinley than was previously indicated, Alexander Ludwig's strangely menacing turn as Sergeant Declan O'Brady takes a momentarily prominent role, and poor Emily Beecham as Kinley's wife Caroline puts up a valiant struggle to adopt a convincing American accent in the one single monologue of substance she gets, but ultimately the writing and her accent torpedo the scene. Ultimately it culminates in a tedious subplot where Kinley tries to hire and then convince a private military contractor (played beardily and pointlessly by Antony Starr) to honor a deal, which of course fails, leading Kinley to believe he has to go in to save Ahmed and his family all by himself. (For some inexplicable reason this turns out to all be a big misunderstanding, which doesn’t matter in the least except that to me it kind of neatly encapsulated how roughshod and arbitrary the whole screenplay feels.)

All of which amounts to a dull interlude leading up to the very abbreviated-feeling escape scene that merely sets up a deus ex machina moment which might be the most unsatisfying denoument in recent memory.

In the end, then, the film is quite a mixed bag. Ritchie is great at blocking complex pursuit and combat scenes, and he knows how to create an atmosphere of tension without much dialogue. The cinematography is generally excellent, too, which is probably why the firefight-into-Kinley-and-Ahmed-escape is the best sequence of the whole film, even if narratively it should have been either the entire movie or edited into the rescue scenes instead. There are too many characters introduced in the beginning who end up getting basically zero development other than some colorful nicknames; there is too much clumsiness in the non-action scenes both in terms of acting and directing; and the whole thing feels like the producers were trying to treat real-life characters and circumstances with an appropriate level of gravitas and sincerity that a wholly fictional story doesn't require.

More so than anything else though the film feels like what it really needed was some kind of purpose, a point of view, some kind of message or position to take. It doesn't really have much to say about the US's war in Afghanistan in general, and barely has enough of an opinion about the treatment of Afghan interpreters serving the US military and their treatment both by the US and by the Taliban outside a small title card at the end of the film. It doesn't attempt to illuminate a broader topic or even make any commentary on this conflict and seems content to assume everyone watching it will view the Taliban as generically evil and the US military as generically noble.

Mugen Spiral (manga) by Kusanagi Mizuho

Huh? What? Is that it? 

Seriously speaking, is that already the final volume? 

That is the ending?

Holy pencil and pens! It was awfully done! I do not like how they finished it! Uh-oh, the author failed to give climax to the ending! Argggh. There was no drastic character development! Even the plot was a half-pie milieu! 

Was it dropped to be how it ended with so many plotholes? I like it because when I read the first volume, I was convinced that this got a very pretty story concept. But the ending just left me choking by utter surprise.

★★☆☆☆

Directed by: Eric Darnell, Tom McGrath and Conrad Vernon

Written by: Eric Darnell and Noah Baumbach

Sometimes you go to a movie just for the company, just to engage in leisure with someone you like or love or enjoy company. I think this is often the case with kids: parents endure children's entertainment for the sake of seeing the delight in their offspring. I like taking my daughter to the movies because it helps confer the love of the theater experience to her, to watch as she delights in the spectacle of the darkened room, the larger-than-life screen and sound, the dedication to sustained activity. Plus, when it's done right, kid-friendly movies can be enjoyable for adults, too. I liked Tangled and Despicable Me and I often enjoy Pixar movies; everyone wins.

Of course, sometimes you have to endure stuff like Madagascar 3. The series, which I've never really thought had much to offer (I've seen snippets of the original and labored through the second), returns to wear out its continually thinning welcome with uninspired art design and a curiously talky script that has the lion, the zebra, the giraffe and the hippo (who have names, but I can't ever seem to keep them in my head, nor does it appear to matter) loose in Europe after yet another credibility-straining mishap, trying to duck a relentless French animal control officer by hiding out in a traveling circus.

The jokes are abundant but few are really funny and after awhile the "comedy" dissolves into a one-note repetition of the trailer-highlight "Circus Afro" song. Eventually the refrain is remixed with the "You Got To Move It" power dance track that so annoyingly worms its way into ears from the first two flicks, resulting a sort of unholy brain-sticking über-irritant that cannot be scrubbed clean even with hours of quality redirection in the form of Arcade Fire or Blind Pilot. Take it from someone with experience.

I think the principal issue with Madagascar 3 is that it tries to find the magic formula that Pixar has developed for blending memorable characters with touching, affirming plots and avoiding too much dip into traditional, slapstick cartoon formula. The problem is that Madagascar 3 is really only noteworthy when it trades on its Saturday Morning roots because the characters aren't memorable and the script isn't that good. Similar to the well-tread Ice Age franchise (notably also executed by Dreamworks Animation), the funniest parts are those that channel Friz Freling or Chuck Jones, not Brad Bird and John Lasseter.

One For The Money

★★☆☆☆

Directed by: Julie Anne Robinson

Written by: Stacy Sherman, Karen Ray and Liz Brixius

Based on the Novel by: Janet Evanovich

Up front, I need to clarify that I have read the book this movie was based on. However, I'm not what you'd call a huge fan of the series; I've read the first few and I'll probably read some more. The books are fun, not fabulous; good, not great. So unlike some other adaptations, I didn't really go into this with sky-high expectations, fearful that the filmmakers might ruin my beloved stories and characters. It felt like all they needed to do was capture a few key notes from the beach-ready books and they'd be fine.

Well, they didn't really do that. I mean, the one thing the books aren't is boring, and I found this movie to be surprising in how uninteresting it was. It sort of meanders along, missing a lot of the flavor that gives the book its heart, and then right at the end it floods the narrative with too much happening at once. Don't get me wrong, the plot of the first novel is hardly stellar to begin with, but what makes the book work that is lacking from the screenplay is the dynamic secondary characters. But where the book can devote enough time to making each of them shine, the movie feels compressed and rushed so none of the fun supporting cast is ever really given a chance to shine.

But the worst problem with the adaptation is that it gets two characters wrong who need to be right. One is part of the supporting cast, Grandma Mazur, who in the books is specifically non-judgmental of the protagonist. Here, Grandma (played with too much camera-winking by Debbie Reynolds) is sort of an uninteresting hair-tousler which basically ruins her character from the book. Even more egregious is the depiction of heroine Stephanie Plum, herself. I put a lot of the blame on Katherine Heigel, who plays Plum as this kind of smirking, gun-toting, poorly-Jersey-accented tough gal. My umbrage is that isn't how Plum is presented in the books at all. She's far less certain of herself, less casually accepting of the mayhem that unfolds around her, and it endears her to the audience. Here, Heigel's blasé Plum eyerolls her way through the caper and there's never a point at which you really feel the tension between her and Morelli (played with washboard-stomached inconsistency by Jason O'Mara) that kind of drives Evanovich's novel.

Like I said, I'm not a superfan of the book series which is why I actually had some hopes that this adaptation could streamline some of the clumsier elements in the early Evanovich novels, but instead director Robinson, who seems to have mostly worked in TV prior to this, amps up the pace to an attention-deficit level that the script can't keep up with and leaves the actors untethered to create shadows of what they ought to be.

The Expendables

★★☆☆☆

Directed by: Sylvester Stallone

Written by: David Callaham and Sylvester Stallone

What amused me the most about The Expendables is how there is zero emotional heft to the film, and the protagonists are never in serious danger. You might think, in a film like this where there are a half-dozen roughnecks as the principals, that one or more of them was destined to croak in your standard action/buddy formula to provide a reason for the survivors to rally and defeat the odds. But no. Everyone lives. I guess that's a spoiler? The thing is, it's never really even implied that one of these guys might not make it. They take down literally hundreds of apparently highly-trained soldiers with the realism and nonchalance of saturday morning G.I.Joes, only with more blood and shorn body parts and stuff.

I guess this is supposed to be an old-school action film with practically every 80s and 90s action star under the sun, but even though we're supposed to care that Jason Statham's Lee Christmas lost his girl to a douchey jock, it's not possible because Lee Christmas is not a character but a tool for the script to show that even guys who stick knives into people's necks for a living feel sad sometimes. There's some sort of claptrap about these mercenaries doing things for a greater cause, but it's muddy and uninteresting. There's one scene that could be decent but it's like something from another movie, where Mickey Rourke as Tool reminisces about the darkness that weighs on a conscience from senseless brutality, but whatever power could have come from a monologue like that is comically undone by the senseless brutality the movie traffics in to sell itself. I guess it's okay to watch people being cut apart for entertainment but if you have to do the cutting it makes you wax poetic in a blue light? I didn't really get what it was all about. Really it's just some random words to make the audience feel like there is a moral imperative for Stallone and Statham and Jet Li and some other people to go slaughter people.

Hot Tub Time Machine

★★☆☆☆

Directed by: Steve Pink

Written by: Josh Heald, Sean Anders and John Morris

Admittedly, you can't go into a movie called "Hot Tub Time Machine" with high expectations. But I did kind of think that it had the potential to be a stupid/silly good time, and attributed the fact that it doesn't have much community love to the fact that the premise is ridiculous. I was in a mood where ridiculous premises were okay by me, so I gave it a shot. The thing is, the premise isn't the problem here, and in fact it's a medium entertaining dude-oriented romantic comedy (which is to say it's very bromantic). That should be enough to earn it a modest three stars. The main problem is that it isn't very funny. I could forgive almost everything else that Hot Tub Time Machine struggles with if only there had been some decent laughs, but there are really none.

Captain America: The First Avenger

★★★★☆

Directed by: Joe Johnston

Written by: Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely

Based on the Comic Book Created by: Jack Kirby and Joe Simon

Thor

★★☆☆☆

Directed by: Kenneth Branagh

Written by: Ashley Miller, Zack Stentz, Don Payne, J. Michael Straczynski and Mark Protosevich

Based on the Comic Book Created by: Stan Lee, Larry Lieber and Jack Kirby

I mentioned in my review of Iron Man 2 that Tony Stark and his alter ego were underdog favorites of mine as a kid. The same cannot be said of Captain America or Thor. Something about Captain America's pseudo-sissy non-weapon of choice and his principal focus of patriotism made him a big yawn for me. Thor on the other hand, I just didn't get. His costume was lame, he was based on Norse mythology which was kind of cool but then he was somehow involved in the rest of the Marvel continuity and he just felt like a Superman ripoff somehow. I dunno, I guess I'm funny about superheroes.

But the thing is, the characters themselves don't really matter. What makes a comic book story interesting is not the origin story or the costume or the powers, it's the story and what you do with the character that makes the difference. And from everything I ever tried, Thor and Cap always had boring books. However, as I also mentioned in my Iron Man 2 review, I've gotten pretty amped for the upcoming Avengers movie so I felt it my duty as an occasional comic book nerd and frequent movie dork to "catch up" as it were with the in-movie continuity. I rented both and watched them back to back.

What struck me initially was the difference in quality between the two flicks. Had you asked before I watched them both which I was likely to enjoy more, I'd have probably put my money on Thor as being the better of the two. The surprising thing is, I enjoyed Captain America immensely more than Thor.

This is a double review so let's start with the weaker of the two. The principal problem with Thor is that it had way too many writers involved. Any time you see more than one or two names on a writer's byline, it's worth being cautious. Thor is a mess because it has too many characters, tries to cover too much ground and can't possibly cram everything into its two hour running time. Now, lots of characters aren't necessarily a bad thing, but lots of characters who have to portray believable relationships with themselves and lots of characters that need compelling arcs means you have to be laser focused to get it all into a standard length film. Consider: We have our title protagonist, Thor, who must have a principal arc himself, plus he needs relationship arcs with each of the following: His father Odin, his brother Loki, his band of warrior-friends (ideally this would be individual, with so much else going on it has to be collective, which means these characters ought to be combined into one or two at the most; here there are four) and his Earthly love interest, Jane. There is also the matter of his mother, Frigga, S.H.I.E.L.D. agent Coulson, the transporter guardian Heimdall and the leader of the sworn enemies of Asgard, frost giant King Laufey, each of whom should have some kind of purpose in the film but whom for various reasons can't possibly get enough development to ever matter.

There is enough story inherent in the Thor/Loki/Odin dynamic, along with the frost giant threat and King Laufey, to make for a full and complete movie. There is also enough story in the dynamic of Thor losing his power, being cast to Earth and having to prove himself while he learns to love humans through the proxy in Jane for a complete movie. What you can't do is take two entire arcs and try to interweave them or overlap them and hope that somehow, magically, they end up being complete as the sum of their parts. It's too much to ask of everyone involved. Some of the things that get lost in this particular shuffle: a believable relationship between Thor and Jane; a believable character arc for Loki; a purpose for the frost giants and/or King Laufey; a coherent connection to S.H.I.E.L.D.; an explanation for why Heimdall has so damn much screen time and development when other characters like, say, Odin or Loki, do not.

It's not easy to pinpoint the exact source of the problem, apart from an overly ambitious script. Chris Hemsworth—well, he certainly looks like Thor, I'll give him that. He's pretty good at portraying the cocky bravado of the pre-exile Thor, but he struggles to convincingly display character growth so that when he inevitably learns to deserve his powers it kid of feels like, "Uh, yeah, sure. Okay." And bless Natalie Portman's pretty heart: she is one of the most inconsistent actresses around. Given challenging, dynamic, expectation-busting roles (Closer, Black Swan, The Professional) and she can stand up with the best in the biz. But she advertises her satisfaction with the shoot and the script on her sleeve, and if she's asked to come across as the girl next door, or she's asked to put impact into flat dialogue, she struggles to even be believable as a human (Star Wars, Mars Attacks). Anthony Hopkins and Renee Russo are wasted as Odin and Frigga, and Tom Hiddleston gamely gives his Loki what he has, but he's no match for a script that can't seem to decide what he's supposed to be from one minute to the next.

What really frustrates about Thor is that it gets so caught up in its story that it forgets to even be big dumb fun. There are precious few special effects-laden action sequences, though there are an awful lot of scenes of people getting teleported in the Bifrost portal. I mean, there are so many that it starts to get funny. The Bifrost ends up being the most well-rounded character in the whole film, and its demise is the one that had the most emotional impact. Actually, I take that back because excepting King Laufey and the non- or semi-sentient Destroyer robot thing that Thor and friends fight at the end, everyone else makes it out alive. Not exactly high stakes for the good guys, you know? One early battle sequence between Thor's warriors and the frost giants is pretty visually stimulating, but after that all the action is far inferior to even the Black Widow infiltration scene from Iron Man 2. If you can't outdo Scarlett Johansson in spandex and you're a friggin' GOD—

Well, actually, I can see how that would be hard to stack up against. Anyhow.

So after Thor, I wasn't really having high hopes for Captain America. But I was amazed to find that it was actually much, much better than Thor. The main thing Captain America does right that Thor doesn't is it sets up the Rip Van Winkle bit at the very beginning and very end of the movie, but 98% of it is all origin story set in World War II. Now, I'll grant that the set up of Steve Rogers being this wimpy little pencilneck and having beefcake Chris Evans play him with CGI kind of like a reverse Hulk effect is a bit transparent sometimes. But, I'll be honest. You can tell in The Hulk that they got away with some cartoony effects because typically when the big green guy is onscreen, he's jumping around, flinging Mack trucks and dodging tank shells. These are action scenes and we've trained ourselves as the audience to let go of some of our visual disbelief when the fightin' starts. So it's impressive that nearly every effects shot of Steve Rogers is a slow, lingering, well-lit shot and it almost always works.

The story follows über-patriot Rogers as he tries to enlist in the army but is constantly thwarted by the bad genetic hand he was dealt. A German expat, Dr. Erskine, working with the US Army against the Nazis, selects Rogers to be part of an experimental program to make super soldiers. The result of the serum and some tech help from a young Howard Stark (father of Iron Man's Tony), the transform the scrawny Rogers into a muscle-bound badass with strength, speed, agility and stamina beyond any normal human. A saboteur from a fringe occult research branch of the Nazi party, Hydra, infiltrates the experiment and tries to steal Erskine's serum. Rodgers stops him, but Erskine dies in the process, setting the program back. Rogers is then facing two options: settle for life as a professional lab rat, or try to do something to help. He agrees to become a pitchman for the Army, doing traveling bond promotional shows, and seems to be more or less into it until he goes to do a show for some actual front line troops who are disgusted by his phony showboating and boo him off the stage. When he realizes they're so hostile because he's a pretend soldier while they just got practically wiped out by Hydra, Rogers, aided by skeptical love interest Peggy Carter (played with smooth British charm by Hayley Atwell, channeling Eva Green's Vesper Lynd from Casino Royale), stages a daring rescue.

Rogers begins to embrace his abilities and the Army falls in line, granting him leadership over many of the rescued POWs to form a task force specifically designed to combat Hydra, who are growing immensely powerful under the leadership of Johann Schmidt, also known as Red Skull. Red Skull happens to be the only other person to have received the serum, albeit in an earlier form that left him deformed with a blazing red, skull-like visage.

The nice thing about Captain America is that it uses a straightforward, classic hero's quest tale to give a sense that you're really watching an old comic book come to life. The action is stylized and unrealistic, but believable despite and it never goes so far off into lunatic territory that it feels it has to somehow out-tech Iron Man, set some eighty or ninety years in the future. Hugo Weaving turns in a toothy, fun performance as the generically megalomaniacal Red Skull, and the screenwriters resist the temptation to have Captain America rewriting history by getting in a fist fight with Hitler or something. Evans as Rogers is convincingly napoleonic when necessary and does some nice physical acting work early on after getting his powers, showcasing his excitement and glee at finding out what his newly juiced body is capable of. He has legitimate chemistry with Atwell and Tommy Lee Jones turns in a classic performance that is tailor made for his brand of deadpan delivery.

The movie does bog a little right before the climax with some extended montages of Captain and his pals busting up Hydra, and the Bucky character felt kind of shoehorned into the plot to give Cap a bit of emotional turmoil, but all of it is forgivable. My one complaint is that, in spite of my appreciation for them only bookending the film with the present day connection, Evans's acting stumbles a bit right at the end when he's supposed to be in awe of the modern world, so different from the one he remembers. Perhaps the script is what fails here, not giving him enough time to react, but there is just something about the whole scene that doesn't work, and I'd almost expect it to have been something that occurred early in The Avengers film, not as a sour note to leave an otherwise very good movie on.

30 Minutes Or Less

★★☆☆☆

Directed by: Ruben Fleischer

Written by: Michael Diliberti and Matthew Sullivan

There is a peculiar moral bankruptcy that runs through 30 Minutes Or Less, a sort of bromance/comedy/crime caper of a movie. Never mind for a moment that the ostensible protagonist, Nick (played with affable familiarity by Jesse Eisenberg), has practically zero character arc and most of the film's character development is focused on the bungling duo who involve Nick in a hair-brained plot so convoluted that I fear even trying to explain it below. What kills most of 30 Minutes Or Less is that it allows even the supposed heroes of the story to act like socially inebriated douchebags and has the audacity to demand we root for them anyway.

The basic plot is that Dwayne (played with tormented man-child bi-polar disorder by Danny McBride) wants to survive long enough to receive his inheritance from an overbearing, Lotto-winning father (played with zero originality as the overbearing military father guy by Fred Ward). A stripper convinces Dwayne that he would be better served by hastening the outcome and says she knows a guy who can help get it done, for the price of $100,000. Unwilling to put himself on the line, Dwayne recruits his pyrotechnically-inclined buddy, Travis (played with whipped puppy enthusiasm by Nick Swardson), to rig up a bomb vest and recruit some random sucker to earn their money, hire the assassin and net them with the funds to achieve their dreams.

Enter Nick, a stuck-in-neutral twentysomething who works as a pizza delivery guy, racing his car around and smoking dope. His best friend is Chet (a transplanted Tom Haverford from Parks and Recreation via Aziz Ansari) is a schoolteacher, and Chet's twin sister Kate (the one bright spot in the cast, Dilshad Vadsaria, completely and utterly underutilized here) is Nick's dream girl/friendzoner. She reveals plans to move away, which puts backburnered Nick into panic mode and he ends up telling Chet about an old rendezvous with Kate—the catalyst, apparently, for his unrequited love—and a lot of other secrets come out and the two part on bad terms.

When Nick is lured into a trap and kidnapped by Dwayne and Travis, they strap a bomb on his chest and tell him he has less than a day to come up with $100,000 and deliver it to the hitman or they'll blow up the bomb remotely. Nick has to face his rift with Chet and recruit him to help and eventually they decide there is no other solution but to go ahead and rob a bank. The heist goes off with only a few hiccups, but when Nick takes the money to the hitman (played with squeaky-voiced semi-menace by Michael Peña), he realizes there was no attempt to provide the code that will disarm the bomb and he ends up escaping with the money and a long sequence of people yelling at each other occurs resulting in Dwayne and Travis kidnapping Kate to force Nick's hand.

Okay, so spoiler alert: Nick and Chet rescue Kate and wind up with the money. It's a happy ending. Hey, this is supposed to be a comedy, right? Here's the problem: Throughout, Chet and Nick act like giddy schoolchildren as they elude police, terrorize a bank full of innocent civilians, find time to have a heart-to-heart about their disagreements and assault a number of people with physical violence before ultimately causing someone else's death in order to elude capture. If not for a credit cookie at the tail end, it might be inferred that they willfully killed a second person.

Look, it's thing to have a character who is a pothead and drives recklessly while delivering pizzas, it's another to have a guy forced into committing a bank robbery who thinks that, when things work out in his favor, it's perfectly acceptable to keep the money. For him to also get amped and excited about high speed police chases in which cops and probably civilians are injured or even killed, and to celebrate minor physical victories like hitting a guy in the face with a crowbar, it becomes very difficult to view these as relatable characters. It doesn't help that they don't get much in the way of actual progress; one supposes by the end that Nick and Kate will find each other and Chet will be okay with it and Nick will, having been prompted to also quit his dead-end job, turn his life around, but none of that is a given.

Even the film's antagonists, probably intended to be slapsticky and funny-dumb, are sociopathic (excepting Travis who is portrayed as weak and simple-minded, not just in addition to being moral but it almost seems like because he is) and also ultimately victorious. It's not really a dark comedy, but it feels like it oscillates between depravity and lightness unintentionally, as though the writers had no idea what their choices were actually doing. Contrast this with something like Pulp Fiction, which has plenty of lighthearted moments but never once loses sight of what it is and what its characters mean. 30 Minutes Or Less is full of characters who, by benefit of being witness to their actions, we can see as being incongruent with the tone and the context of the overall story.

It doesn't help that while 30 Minutes Or Less has a handful of genuinely funny lines and a handful of funny scenes, is a "you saw most of the good stuff in the trailer" film. That is to say, the key jokes and gags are of the sort that you can get the full effect from a three-second snippet while you fiddle with opening your Junior Mints box. In other words: Fairly lazy.