The film follows Nick Davis, a man who works as a pizza delivery driver and rarely completes the "30 Minutes or Less" policy which leads to him being reprimanded by his boss. Nick's school teacher friend Chet discovers that Nick slept with his twin sister, Kate, on their high school graduation night, causing Chet to end their friendship.
Buddies Dwayne Mikowlski and Travis Cord are miserable, living under the shadow of Dwayne's domineering father, Jerry "The Major", who won over $10 million in the lottery about 10 years prior. Dwayne confides in lap-dancer Juicy about his contempt for his father and his presumed inheritance.
They devise a plot to kidnap a complete stranger, to strap a bomb to his chest, and get him to get them hitman money. They order a pizza and wait for a driver to come to their hideout. When Nick arrives, Dwayne and Travis assault him and knock him unconscious.
When Nick awakes, he is in a vest rigged with explosives, with both a timer and phone-activated detonators. The bomb will explode unless he gets them $100,000 within ten hours, and they also threaten to detonate the bomb if Nick notifies the police. Nick finds Chet, alerts him of the situation, and he reluctantly agrees to help Nick rob a bank. En route, Nick goes to say goodbye to Kate and quits his job.
Nick and Chet hold up the bank and flee quickly. Dwayne says he and Travis will meet Nick at an abandoned rail yard to make the exchange, but go to a restaurant. Instead, Dwayne calls Juicy to get the hit-man to go. Juicy and the hit man Chango arrive to pick up the money, but do not have the bomb deactivation code. Chet appears and knocks out Chango with a metal bar while Nick incapacitates Juicy. The two grab the money and escape.
Frustrated by the turn of events when Nick refuses to answer the phone again, Dwayne activates the speed dial number on his phone for the bomb to explode, but Travis had altered the number. Rethinking their plan, he and Dwayne head to Kate's apartment in their masks and kidnap her. Chango breaks into the Major's house, the Major attacks him with a pen gun, but is shot by Chango after a struggle. Chango then finds a hand-drawn map to the scrapyard. Dwayne threatens to kill Kate unless Nick meets up with him at the scrapyard.
At the scrapyard, Dwayne gives Nick the code to deactivate and unbuckle the bomb with just minutes to spare. Dwayne has them at gunpoint but Nick has Chet fake having a sniper on them by pointing with his laser pointer. Believing him, Dwayne and Travis drop their weapons and Nick starts to leave with Kate. However, Chango knocks him out, then has Dwayne at gunpoint, demanding the money. Dwayne gives the money to him, but Chango decides to still kill him and is torched with a flamethrower by Travis. While burning on the ground, Chango wounds Dwayne and shoots the gas tank on Travis's back, causing it to explode.
Nick grabs the money and leaves with Kate and Chet. Dwayne chases after them and when he is about to shoot Nick, the bomb explodes, seemingly killing him. (Nick reveals he reactivated the bomb and put it in Dwayne's van). While Chet looks at the money, a blue dye pack explodes in his face, making the rest of the money worthless.
In a post-credits scene, Dwayne (who survived the explosion), Travis, the Major recuperating in a wheelchair, and Juicy are seen in an advertisement for their new family business called "Major Tan: Tanning Salon", which is implied to be a cover for a prostitution ring.
In the alternative ending, Nick, Chet and Kate drive off with the money, discussing what they will do with their newly gained riches. Meanwhile, Dwayne survives the explosion. Annoyed with his plan's failure, he goes to see if Chango successfully killed his father. Dwayne finds his dad on the floor suffering from his gunshot wound and tells him about the tanning salon/brothel idea. His father is excited and tells his son that he is proud of him.
The final scene is at the Four Seasons in Atlanta, where Kate is managing the special events program. She joins Nick and Chet, who are chilling out by the pool enjoying their new lives. The deceased Chango has been blamed for the bank robbery.
30 Minutes or Less was released on Blu-ray and DVD on November 29, 2011, via Sony Pictures Home Entertainment.[14] It was released on September 16, 2011, in the United Kingdom.[15] The home media release featured an aspect ratio of 2.40:1 and included multiple extras, including a directors commentary from Fleischer, two featurettes detailing notes from the cast and crew, 10 deleted scenes, and outtakes.[16]
On review aggregation website Rotten Tomatoes, the film has an approval rating of 44% based on 162 reviews, with an average rating of 5.42/10. The site's critical consensus reads, "It's sporadically funny and it benefits from a talented cast, but 30 Minutes or Less suffers from a disjointed narrative, and too often mistakes crude gags for true lowbrow humor."[18] On Metacritic, which assigns a weighted average rating to reviews gives the film a score of 49 out of 100, based on 37 critics, indicating "mixed or average reviews".[19]
Peter Bradshaw from The Guardian gave the film a positive review stating that it was made with "flair and ingenuity" despite being "entirely ridiculous."[20] Another reviewer gave a mixed review, criticizing the film for its violence, yet praising it for being "cheerful, willfully subversive, speedy, and lightweight".[21] Kirk Honeycutt of The Hollywood Reporter gave the film a negative review, criticizing Michael Diliberti's screenplay for its "lethally stupid" characters and "extreme dullness"[22]
The plot of the film bears a resemblance to a real-life bank robbery gone wrong that resulted in the death of Brian Wells in 2003.[23] As with the film, Wells was a pizza delivery man who was forced to wear a bomb and then robbed a bank under orders from the plot's mastermind in an effort to have the bomb defused.[24] Additionally, an investigation found that the motive behind the robbery was for Marjorie Diehl-Armstrong, the convicted mastermind, to use the stolen money to hire a hitman to kill her father and receive her inheritance, also like the film.[23] Unlike the film, however, Wells was killed by the bomb after being caught by the police.
Despite the similarities to the case, Sony Pictures Motion Picture Group said the filmmakers and cast had no prior knowledge of the incident, while the screenwriters were "vaguely familiar" with it. Nevertheless, the film drew criticism from Jean Heid, Wells' sister, and Jerry Clark, a former FBI agent who witnessed Wells' death and led the case's investigation.[25]
Even before millions were confined to their homes by a global pandemic, improvements in internet connections and service offerings had led to an exponential increase in the use of streaming video around the world. With few options left for entertainment, streaming services are taking off. In this commentary, we examine the carbon footprint of these services.
Streaming services are associated with energy use and carbon emissions from devices, network infrastructure and data centres. Yet, contrary to a slew of recent misleading media coverage, the climate impacts of streaming video remain relatively modest, particularly compared to other activities and sectors.
Drawing on our analysis and other credible sources, we expose the flawed assumptions in one widely reported estimate of the emissions from watching 30 minutes of Netflix. These exaggerate the actual climate impact by up 90 times.
The relatively low climate impact of streaming video today is thanks to rapid improvements in the energy efficiency of data centres, networks and devices. But slowing efficiency gains, rebound effects and new demands from emerging technologies, including artificial intelligence (AI) and blockchain, raise increasing concerns about the overall environmental impacts of the sector over the coming decades.
Update 11/12/2020: The energy intensity figures for data centres and data transmission networks were updated to reflect more recent data and research. As a result, the central IEA estimate for one hour of streaming video in 2019 is now 36gCO2, down from 82gCO2 in the original analysis published in February 2020. The updated charts and comparisons also include the corrected values published by The Shift Project in June 2020, as well as other recent estimates quoted by the media.
Looking at electricity consumption alone, the original Shift Project figures imply that one hour of Netflix consumes 6.1 kilowatt hours (kWh) of electricity. This is enough to drive a Tesla Model S more than 30km, power an LED lightbulb constantly for a month, or boil a kettle once a day for nearly three months. The corrected figures imply that one hour of Netflix consumes 0.8 kWh.
With 167 million Netflix subscribers watching an average of two hours per day, the corrected Shift Project figures imply that Netflix streaming consumes around 94 terawatt hours (TWh) per year, which is 200 times larger than figures reported by Netflix (0.45TWh in 2019).
The assumptions behind the Shift Project analysis (largely based on a 2015 paper, whose assumptions have been significantly revised in 2019 and 2020) contain a series of flaws, which, taken together, seriously exaggerate the electricity consumed by streaming video.
This difference stemmed from a stated assumption of 3Mbps apparently being converted in error to 3 megabytes per second, MBps, with each byte equivalent to eight bits. The Shift Project corrected this error in their June 2020 update, but did not revise any of their other assumptions, discussed below.
The Shift Project analysis overestimates the energy intensity of data centres and content delivery networks (CDNs) that serve streaming video to consumers by around 35-fold, relative to figures derived from 2019 Netflix electricity consumption data and subscriber usage data.
My original February 2020 analysis showed that the Shift Project assumptions for data transmission energy intensity (0.15-0.88 kWh/GB) were much higher than more recent estimates (0.025-0.23kWh/GB). However, the latest research shows that these data-based intensity values (kWh/GB) are not appropriate for estimating the network energy use of high bitrate applications such as streaming video. Instead, experts advise using time-based energy intensity values (kWh per viewing hour). Therefore, my assumptions for data transmission energy use have been updated with time-based energy intensity values.
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