Ruben Fleischer’s 30 Minutes or Less, released in 2011, stars Jesse Eisenberg as pizza delivery boy Nick Davis, who unwillingly becomes involved in a plot to kill another man’s father. Dwayne Mikowlski (played by Danny McBride) kidnaps Nick with the help of a friend and straps a bomb to his chest. Dwayne’s plan is to have Nick rob a bank for him so he can hire a hitman to murder his dad. The bomb, Nick is informed, will be detonated if he doesn’t comply within a certain amount of time.
If the plot sounds familiar, it might be because of its similarity to a real-life robbery that was once described as “one of the most complicated and bizarre crimes in the annals of the FBI.” On August 28, 2003, a pizza deliveryman named Brian Wells robbed a Pennsylvania bank with a bomb clamped around his neck. Unlike Eisenberg’s character, however, Wells was killed by the bomb shortly after committing the crime. It was later discovered that one of the ringleaders of the robbery was planning to use the money to have her father killed.
The film’s connection to a real tragedy understandably upset some people when it was first released. In an email to the Associated Press, Wells’s sister, Jean, said, “It’s hard for me to grasp how other human beings can take delight and pride in making such a movie and consider it a comedy. I don’t think it’s funny to laugh at the innocent who are victimized by criminals, who care nothing for human life.” Jerry Clark, an FBI agent who witnessed Wells’s death, echoed his sister’s sentiments, saying, “Having been on the scene the day that it happened and watching the device detonate, linking that with a comedy, that’s sort of difficult for me to comprehend.”
Steve Elzer, who was the chief spokesperson for Sony’s Columbia TriStar Motion Picture Group at the time, downplayed the influence Wells’s case had on the movie. “Neither the filmmakers nor the stars of 30 Minutes or Less were aware of this crime prior to their involvement with the film,” he said. Screenwriters Michael Diliberti and Matt Sullivan, on the other hand, had evidently heard about it. According to Elzer, the pair “were vaguely familiar with what had occurred and wrote an original screenplay that does not mirror the real-life tragedy.” Diliberti and Sullivan didn’t respond to the backlash back then, but given their admission, it’d be hard to argue that the case didn’t inspire the basic plot of the film—regardless of whether or not Eisenberg’s character suffered the same fate as Wells.
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