Movie Review

88 Minutes

Al Pacino is one of those few actors whose career is so decorated and quality that you literally would see the biggest piece of crap in the world just to see what he would do in it. Over the years I’ve watched boring (Simone), long and preachy (Angels in America), and just bad (Oceans Thirteen, Two For the Money) movies primarily because he’s the Godfather, Lt. Frank Slade, Serpico, and Scarface to me and he always will be. He embodies greatness and respectability, even in crap, and so I keep going back. 88 Minutes is not crap though, it’s less than crap.

He plays Dr. Jack Gramm, a college professor who also works with the FBI as a forensic psychiatrist. When he receives a phone call telling him he only has 88 minutes to live, he must use his powers of analysis to save his own life. One possible suspect is Jon Forster (Neal McDonough), a serial killer who feels Jack manipulated the jury into sending him to death row. In addition, he also includes a woman he had a one-night stand with and a disgruntled student he slighted into his investigation.

The script by Garry Scott Thompson is embarrassingly, abysmally awful. It’s so startlingly, unconscionably bad that after the first couple scenes, I was fascinated with the depths it was willing to sink too. Start with the tasteless opening scene. A woman is hung by her legs while a man cuts and rapes her. It’s an appalling and uncomfortable thing to watch and above all, it’s not even necessary to show it. Moving on, the Pacino character meets with the D.A investigating the Jon Forster case in the next scene. It should be intense but the introduction of milk and cookies kills the momentum almost immediately.

The movie is a mess with background characters, all of which are underdeveloped and made to look like suspects. And when I say all, I mean everyone from Jack’s students to his apartment security guard. And what’s weird is that they all have shifty-eyes, even the ones who have nothing to do with it. It takes criminal investigation to an absurd and almost borderline retarded degree. One of the funniest scenes of the year so far has Al Pacino chasing cars in a parking lot, convinced that even one of the drivers is a suspect.

And why does the killer try to kill Jack by blowing up his car and shooting at him before the 88 minutes are up? And why does Jack’s teaching assistant (Alicia Witt) need to be in every scene, despite adding nothing to what’s going on? And why does said assistant need to express how she would really like a relationship with the doctor in the middle of running for their lives? And why is Jack’s forensic psychologist team better at doing police work than the actual police? And why do we constantly need to be reminded of the death of a little girl by having her run with a kite on the beach in flashback? And of all the names you could have picked, why on Earth would you name a character Guy LaForge. This all leads up to one of the cheesiest and most preposterous endings I’ve ever seen.

I was going to review the acting but since this is running longer than I expected, I just want to say that Pacino sleeps through the role and gets his paycheck and Leelee Sobieski is one of the cheesiest and phoniest people I’ve ever seen act. She should be acting in “Ogre 2” on the sci-fi channel, not anywhere near Al Pacino. “88 Minutes” is a movie of stunning badness. I found it hard to even keep track of all the ridiculous things that happen in it. It’s still early but I would be surprised if I saw a worse movie this year.

Craig's Grade: D-

A	10.9%
B	41.8%
C	31.8%
D	15.3%
F	0.3%