In 2003, a Pennsylvania pizza-delivery man robbed a bank with a bomb strapped around his neck. He ultimately was alleged to have been part of the robbery scheme, but with the belief that his co-conspirators wouldn’t let him die once he had the money. The robbery took place; the bomb went off. The suspected motivation behind the plan was so one of the man’s accomplices could hire an assassin to kill her father, therefore leaving her with an inheritance.

Whether the pizza guy was truly guilty or coerced to commit a crime, we’ll never know. But the story made someone in Hollywood think, Hey, that would make a great movie — but let’s make it a comedy!

The result is 30 Minutes or Less, and your enjoyment of the film — or, more likely, your decision to see it at all — will probably rely on whether you regard its inspiration as tasteless or brilliant. Directed by Zombieland’s Ruben Fleischer from a script from freshman screenwriter Michael Diliberti, the film is violent, fitfully funny, often offensive, and, needless to say, wildly uneven in tone. But even if they laugh, anyone who knows the back story won’t be able to quite shake the queasy niggling that this actually happened.

30 Minutes opens with Nick (Jesse Eisenberg, taking a huge step down from The Social Network) running red lights and dodging trains and children in order to deliver a pizza in the titular amount of time. (The sequence is set to the Hives’ “Tick Tick Boom.” Classy.) Meanwhile, a more egregious man-child, Dwayne (Danny McBride), and his dirtbag friend Travis (Nick Swardson) are pissy because Dwayne’s former-Marine father (Fred Ward) doesn’t want them sitting around his palatial house (he won a $10 million lottery) and eating his food all day. Actually, when he walks in on the pair, they’re not actually sitting but pretending to hump Jason Voorhees as they watch Friday the 13th, Part 3 in 3D. You immediately sympathize with Dad.

But his horrible mistreatment makes Dwayne receptive to an idea a gold-digging stripper gives him: Kill the guy and get his inheritance early. First, though, he’ll need $100,000 to hire a hit man. (Does this sound familiar?) A dim lightbulb goes off, and Dwayne decides to execute a robbery-by-proxy. For whatever reason, he chooses that proxy to be Nick, luring him into his scrapyard-hideout by ordering a pie, knocking him out, and strapping a bomb to him. Nick will have 10 hours to rob a bank, then will be given a code to diffuse the bomb. If he doesn’t comply, apparent arms-genius Travis will detonate the explosives. Hijinks will surely ensue!

Naturally, Nick needs a partner in crime, so he begs his BFF Chet (Aziz Ansari) to help him out. Also naturally, there has to be a love interest, who happens to be Chet’s twin sister, Kate (Dilshad Vadsaria). That setup guarantees two things: One, that there will be some unresolved tension between the friends. And two, that there will be Indian jokes. Diliberti also throws in jabs at “camel jockeys,” gays, and AIDS amidst all the holy-shit-what-do-we-do wackiness. It’s difficult to laugh while you’re cringing.

Eisenberg does his usual motor-mouthed straight man, though with less success than he has in films such as Zombieland and Adventureland. McBride’s character is too repellant to be funny. The film’s only saving grace is Ansari, whose high-pitched voice and general geniality makes even low-key riffs about Netflix and 5-Hour Energy drinks entertaining. (Freaking out over the robbery, Chet says of the latter, “I’ve had three. It’s, like, too much energy!”) It’s uncertain whether a cop chase set to Glenn Frey’s “The Heat Is On” is meant to be ironic. The bombs, rifles, and flamethrowers, however, are deadly serious — which is perhaps how this real-life story should have been handled.

Jungle fever

Tropic Thunder may have first appeared on your radar last August, when Owen Wilson dropped out of filming after his suicide attempt. Or maybe you heard about it earlier this year, when word got out that Robert Downey Jr., in the film’s movie-within-a-movie, would be playing a black character.

But the premise for this Hollywood-skewering war spoof has reportedly been roller-derbying around writer-director Ben Stiller’s brain since 1987. That’s 21 years spent marinating in the comedian’s twisted psyche, eventually co-molded by scripters Justin Theroux and Etan Cohen and, certainly, further shaped by an A-list cast that includes Jack Black, Nick Nolte, Steve Coogan, and Danny McBride.

The result? A comedy beast that’s nearly impossible to dissect. At least not without giving up the goods, anyway. Whereas the details about Downey’s racial transformation, for example – his character, Kirk Lazarus, is actually an Australian actor so celebrated and Method he’s hired to portray an African-American soldier in a Vietnam flick – might have comprised 75 percent of the gag in lesser hands, here the concept is a mere launching point for a performance so brilliant, it’s fair to regard Lazaurs as August’s Joker. Another not-so-secret cameo may help rinse the ick off a superstar’s recently tarred reputation. (Though, in my opinion, not quite.)

There are fake trailers, surprise violence, layers upon layers of film-industry mockery, and rampant offensiveness that’s attracted cries for boycotts from more than one activist group. You can hear Stiller’s diligence to his vision in the dialogue: “More stupid!” demands a villain who takes the director’s character, Tugg Speedman, hostage and orders him to re-create one of his broad critical flops. He complies, delivering this nugget as a mentally challenged man talking about bad dreams: “This head movie makes mah eyes rain!” Earlier, Lazarus discusses craft with Speedman, declaring that his commitment to the aforementioned part must have left him feeling “moronical.”

The thing about moronicality is that it takes loads of intelligence to get it right, and in this regard Tropic Thunder can sidle up to classics from Some Like It Hot to The Jerk. For all its comedic density, the plot is simple: A memoir by Four Leaf Tayback (Nolte), Vietnam’s Pvt. Ryan, is being adapted to the big screen by clueless British director Damien Cockburn (Coogan). He can’t control his cast, which besides Lazarus and action-hero Speedman includes rapper-turned-actor Alpa Chino (Brandon T. Jackson), drug-addled star of Eddie Murphy-esque franchise The Fatties, Jeff Portnoy (Black), and still-level-headed newcomer, Kevin Sandusky (Jay Baruchel).

Tayback suggests that Cockburn “take them off the grid” to scare the artistes out of his actors and elicit more believable performances. But Cockburn’s orchestrated dumping of his cast into the jungle for a guerrilla shoot goes immediately wrong, and soon well-armored poppy farmers assume the actors are DEA agents. The thespians’ survival skills kick in – eventually – as they try to fight their way back to the world of gift bags and Booty Sweat (Chino’s energy drink).

Unlike last week’s Pineapple Express, Tropic Thunder’s blood-and-guts angle is introduced early and graphically, so its combination of action and yucks never feels disingenuous. All of the big players have ace moments – even Matthew McConaughey,who took over Wilson’s part as Speedman’s agent – but Stiller and Downey steal it: Stiller’s Speedman is a superior Derek Zoolander, hilarious whether he’s wriggling his body while dramatically taking bullets or quietly going nuts in captivity.

And it’s all of 30 seconds before Downey kills, in this case in his character’s trailer, without even uttering a word: Dressed as a monk – and still white – his expression during the preview’s narration is a dead-on imitation of every pretentious performance ever captured onscreen. As far as his guttural delivery and mannerisms when “black,” it’s too thorough, ridiculous, and well-plotted to be offensive (and Chino calls Lazarus on it repeatedly for good measure).

Speedman’s “Simple Jim” character – with buck teeth and a peroxide Prince Valiant cut — isn’t as excusable. But the script’s ingenious argument of the drawbacks of an actor “going full retard” — as well as the movie overall – will make your eyes rain.

Pantsless in Pineapple

Forgive the phrasing, but the stoner comedy Pineapple Express starts on a high note. It’s 1937, on a military base filmed in black and white. (Stay with me: The prologue will make you wonder if you’re in the wrong theater even if you’re not baked.) The government is testing “Item 9” on one Pvt. Miller (Bill Hader), who’s forced to smoke the substance in a sealed room.

“How do you feel?” a researcher asks. “Well, sir, I feel like a slab of butter melting over…a big ol’ pile of flapjacks,” Miller says—extremely slowly. A follow-up about what Miller thinks of his boss induces a series of random impressions of musical instruments, assurances that “This [stuff] is great,” and then a string of expletives. The government’s conclusion is vehement and swift: “Illegal!”

Cut to the present, and Dale Denton (Seth Rogen) is toking and driving, also apparently demonstrating how harmless marijuana is by calling in to a talk show to argue for decriminalization. Dale makes his living as a process server, meaning he needs to come up with clever ways to deliver subpoenas and gets sworn at a lot.

To make life more pleasant, he smokes—constantly—and has recently begun buying from Saul (James Franco), the quintessential dealer: a genial longhair who’s on the couch nearly 24/7, watching old sitcoms and dozing with snacks close by. Saul is a puppy and takes a liking to Dale, selling him the new, rare strain of weed that gives the film its name and trying to get him to hang around by saying they can “look at some crazy things on the Internet together.”

The rapport between Rogen and Franco is immediately charming, and the movie’s best scenes are the early ones establishing their characters. Dale is typical Rogen, schlubby and stunted—he’s dating an 18-year-old high-school girl—but with hints of levelheaded promise. And Franco, a former member of the Judd Apatow family (Freaks and Geeks), has made up for years of forgettable, wooden dramatic turns with Saul: He’s more sweet than smart, loyal to his friends, and deals so he can take care of his grandma. Saul’s surfer-dude demeanor may scream stereotype, but Franco’s eyes have a sparkle beneath their glaze that’s irresistible.

More important, it’s pretty funny when they’re high together. Rogen and longtime friend/Superbad co-writer Evan Goldberg clearly write what they know: Watching the characters cough may get old fast, but odd stoner habits (what is it about ancient TV shows?) and conversations steered by short-term memory loss and sudden flares of hypersensitivity are more entertainingly subtle than the whoa-dude caricatures of Cheech & Chong and even Harold & Kumar.

But then Pineapple Express turns into an action movie, which is weird for a couple of reasons, not least of which is that the director is David Gordon Green, who made Snow Angels and All the Real Girls. Though the remainder of Pineapple Express’ 113 minutes isn’t exactly a comedown, the film starts to feel like it’s desperately chasing that first buzz.

Dale and Saul’s imbroglio begins when Dale is sitting in his car outside of the home of Ted Jones (Gary Cole), smoking while waiting to serve the guy papers. Dale freaks out when a cop (Rosie Perez) pulls up behind him; when she goes into Ted’s house and they both shoot a third man in plain view, Dale freaks some more.

He tosses his roach, spectacularly un-parallel parks, and runs to his only sorta-buddy for guidance. (The script is also sharp at addressing the unusual faux friendship that usually develops between a dealer and his clients.) When Saul tells him that he bought his stash of express indirectly from Ted—and that Dale’s the only person he’s sold it to—they hightail it, certain that Ted will find the joint and know that one of them witnessed the killing.

After a tedious scene of the pair hiding in the woods, the movie is overtaken by lots of hysteria and violence, countered only by interludes of now-familiar Apatowian bromance. Saul, Dale, and Saul’s supplier, Red (Danny McBride), bond, fight, and make up more realistically than anything starring Sandra Bullock; meanwhile, Dale’s relationship with his girlfriend (Amber Heard) exists only to show how immature he is.

The later scenes are fitfully amusing, but mostly just brash, if not downright surprising: Dale and Saul’s half-assed attempts at hand-to-hand combat are usually funny, but at some point the filmmakers go all Bad Boys on us, with machine guns wielded and people actually dying. In one scene, it seems as if Rogen, after Dale pile-drives Red into a wall, asks, “Was that too much?” as himself, not his character.

Yeah, it’s a little too much. But you’ll get that flapjack-butter feeling all over again when the guys later recap their adventure as if it were a crazy frat party—or a different movie.