Customer Reviews

88 Minutes

5 star:		(15)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(14)
2 star:		(16)
1 star:		(36)

 

 

88 Minutes is a tried and true "whodunit" shock/thriller clone that may entertain briefly but is at best a guilty pleasure. The story is a Hollywood teaser line: A renown forensic psychologist (Pacino) testifies against a serial killer and then 9 years later on the day of the killer's execution gets a phone call that he has 88 minutes to live.

This may be enough to get Hollywood producers frothing at the mouth and shelling out money, but this is a classic case of a movie that should have stayed a trailer-- the concept fits best into a 30-second package. Watching this movie is like eating a stale doughnut: You see it in the box with all of yesterdays crumbs and think, "That can't be very good, but I want it." You eat it. And then you regret it until the next stale doughnut comes along.

There are 3 main problems to this movie:

1. Pacino plays Pacino: Like Harrison Ford and Clint Eastwood, Al Pacino is getting old (sorry, but it's true). This movie showcases that by juxtaposing him with a class of young co-eds that he supposedly teaches psychology to and having him flirt with them in a decidedly "dirty old man" way. Never in this movie do you think "This is Dr. Gramm, the brilliant and famous forensic psychologist." No, this is Al Pacino stumbling around and yelling into a cell phone every five minutes. As the plot unfolds (more on that later), Pacino combats the killer with cantankerous "hoo-ha!" instead of a psychologist's keen insight. And after the movie nobody even remembers his character's name; it's just Pacino. That might be ok, except that it's an old, grumpy Pacino who refuses to be filmed opposite a female over the age of 25.

2. The Plot: This is an Agatha Christie whodunit with all the investigating stripped out and replaced with shock/gore. It starts with the initial murder which has that sicko-rapist creepiness, and then once it gets going with the "88 minutes" it's just one red herring suspect after another (complete with altered flashbacks and ominous music when you see them).

3. Lack of Characters: There aren't any characters in this movie. Period. There's Pacino playing himself. There are a bunch of vapid co-eds. There's a generic serial killer with no personality (other than he likes to kill/rape people). And that's it. Pacino gets a tragic backstory, but it's the same family trauma crap we see in every crime protagonist. Everyone else is just window dressing: victims, suspects, people for Pacino to say "Hoo-ha!" to on the cell phone (I think at its core this is a cell phone commercial).

In short, unless you really like Pacino and cell phones and wonder how much Hollywood makeup can make him look like a leading man again (similar to the morbid curiosity of watching the last Indiana Jones movie), don't rent or buy this movie.

I'd like to pour some deep thought into why this was a bad movie, but nothing about this movie was deep. And I've already wasted 88 minutes watching it and do not want to lose any more time.

Bad acting. Weak story. How the killer sets up all the murder scenes in minutes and then (teleports?) to the next crime is quite difficult to figure out. Did Pacino read the script or just look at the payout on the contract? Are actors like Deniro and Pacino hard up for money. They both seem to be ending their careers on sour notes.

The only remotely interesting part of the movie was watching Pacino's hair. It's teased enough to put most 80 hair bands to shame.

Made-for-TV dreck masquerading as a theatrical feature. Straitjacketed by Jon Avnet's lethargic direction, the usually formidable Al Pacino punches the time clock as a forensic psychiatrist in this so-called "thriller." Did anyone bother to read the script before shooting the first frame? A waste of your hard-earned 108 minutes.

In "88 Minutes," a gimmicky crime thriller directed by Jon Avnet, Al Pacino plays Jack Gramm, a forensic psychiatrist and university professor whose testimony played a crucial role in the conviction of a serial killer nine years earlier. Now, on the day the man is to be executed, Jack receives an anonymous phone call informing him that he has only 88 minutes to live. Could it be that the doomed-to-die convict has found a way to exact his own form of personal vengeance before heading off to that great big penitentiary in the sky?

Now, upon getting this message, does Jack drive himself to the nearest police station and have himself put under protective custody, as any reasonable and sensible person would surely do? Heavens no. Instead, he races all over metropolitan Seattle, systematically confronting everyone he views as a possible suspect - which, it turns out, is pretty much any person who is in any way involved with his life - while the ticking clock brings him ever closer to his prescribed end.

Gary Scott Thompson's mess of a screenplay stretches credibility beyond the breaking point, throwing so many red herrings and plot inconsistencies at the audience that we simply give up trying to make any sense out of it. Plus, in any story in which literally every single character (including Jack himself) is, at one point or another, a possible suspect, we know we're being played for fools and our resentment towards those who made the film begins to boil over in a serious way. In the final analysis, there's really no way to keep such a scenario from becoming more and more laughable and ridiculous the longer it goes on. In fact, the best line in the film goes to one of Jack's students who, after her ex-boyfriend has been shot and killed, an entire apartment building evacuated due to poisonous gas, and Jack's car blown to smithereens, all in the space of a few minutes, casually mutters, "What next?" It`s the same question the eye-rolling audience has been asking itself throughout the course of the movie. And to top it all off, the final confrontation scene is so preposterously staged and absurdly overacted that it feels almost like a parody of a crime thriller denouement. This may not be the worst script ever written, but you sure gotta' give `em props for trying.

It's no exaggeration to suggest that this supremely idiotic thriller may well stand as the undisputed nadir of Pacino's otherwise long and distinguished career. Just know that these are 88 minutes (actually 107, if you count the entire running-time of the film) out of your life that you will never get back.

About the most complex contribution Jon Avnet's 88 Minutes makes is that it somehow manages to be both predictable and surprisingly disappointing. Writer Guy Scott Thompson, whose other contributions include the TV show Knight Rider (2008), provides a fairly simple plot involving a highly successful celebrity psychiatrist (celebrity in that he's well-esteemed in his small Seattle pond, not celebrity in that he councils the rich and famous) who is slowly stalked (via cell phone!) by a creepy techno-altered voice that may or may not be coming from a copy-cat killer. Pacino, who is entirely miscast here, approaches his Dr. Gramm as if to say, I have played this character a thousand times. Now, what's my line? Typically he is stimulating and brings energy to even the most 2-dimensional roles, yet here he seems only exhausted and disheveled.

Dr. Gramm, despite being quite successful profiling crime scenes and serial killers, has terrible boundaries with his students. He flirts with them, drinks with them, and is out one night with them at a bar celebrating the fact that a serial killer (Neal McDonough) he helped send to death row has lost an appeal for clemency. Soon someone is dead and then we all arrive with Pacino staring out at his classroom, wondering which one of the clean-cut, pretty, model-like actresses is the killer.

It isn't long before we have car explosions and lots of people, including the unknown techno-voice killer, scrambling around and haunting each other on the phone. People jump from behind dark corners in garage stairwells, cryptic taunts miraculously appear, and then characters seem to suddenly get invented and written into the script for no other reason than to serve as "yet another unexpected suspect" who we all know didn't really do it. Or maybe they did. By the time we are head-first into this thing we don't really care. By the time the real killer is finally presented, we are delighted - not because we are surprised but because then we know that this convoluted and contrived mess that has all of the logic and brilliance of a 90s B-flick (see Sliver) is finally coming to an end. At some point I actually grew as exhausted as Pacino looks and lost interest and started counting how many times his character's phone rang, say, within 5 minutes. That was far more entertaining than the 108 minutes lost watching 88 Minutes.

88 Minutes features a "real-time" gimmick, and if that wasn't enough to lure you in, it stars Al Pacino as Jack Gramm; a forensic psychiatrist and college professor who begins receiving phone calls telling him he has, you guessed it, 88 minutes to live. Next thing you know, he's being followed and harassed around every corner, frequently reminded of how long he has to live. Could it be a conspiracy orchestrated by the serial killer (Neal McDonough) that he helped put in jail a few years before? Even though 88 Minutes attempts to throw red herring and twist after twist at you, it won't take you too long to figure it all out. This wouldn't be so bad if it weren't for the fact that the film itself is just awful and boring to watch. Pacino just seems so bored with the material here that it's disappointing to see him in this mess, while supporting players including the usually dependable Alicia Witt, Amy Brenneman, William Forsythe, Deborah Kara Unger, and Leelee Sobieski especially are just horrid. Jon Avnet's overly flashy directing doesn't help matters either, and as a whole 88 Minutes is just mind-numbing. All in all, no matter how much of a Pacino fan you may be, these are 88 minutes that are definitely not worth your time.

88 Minutes is the story of Dr. Jack Gramm (played by Al Pacino), a forensic scientist who works for the FBI. After providing testimony that puts a serial killer to jail, the killings mysterious start up again. It is here that the story starts.

Without pulling any punches, this movie was horrendous. The script was one of the worst I have had to stomach all year. It was cheesy, horribly written, and provided the actors with so little to work with that it actually made Al Pacino look like a fool.

A couple examples of its foolishness:

1) Early in the movie, Jack Gramm helps a student who has been injured. In 15 minutes (we know because the movie is counting down actual time in minutes), the student manages to allow police to question her, have her injuries treated (we know this happened because she shows up again soon looking great!), go to Gramm's office for files, and show up at an apartment. All this in 15 minutes? In a major city, to boot.

2) Near the end of the movie, the killer allows a woman tethered to a rope to slip down 20 feet. She pulls the rope back up with little effort, and in a few seconds. Later in the scene, the woman slips again, but this time 2 grown, healthy men struggle to pull the rope (and the woman) back up to safety.

Another beef I had with this flick: product placement. Between the non-stop MSNBC promotion, the director slips in Dogpile.com and Terminex ads. Please, no commercials with my movie...thank you very much.

Bottom line...this is one of the worst films I have viewed in 2008. Watch it at your own risk. And then avoid all future films by this writer and director.

Wow, this was terrible. Almost impressively so. Red Herrings? Hah, mildly pink tadpoles is more like it. There alleged twists and potential suspects are so thin that it only occured to me after the fact that I was supposed to take them seriously.

It's never a good idea to have the main character be a complete moron. My favourite scene is the one where he spies a suspicious character for the 4th time (he'd chased him the 3rd time but lost him) and just watches him walk away without doing anything. ("Hmm, you got away this time mystery-man because my car is this way, and you're walking that way...")

I have a long list of scenes from this movie that I love to hate. ("I wonder where he went after the party." Oh wait, he was at the party? So that guy was your ex? Perhaps we should have established that before moving on to where he went after the party?) But I can't go into them all here because it's only fun if you've seen the movie and want to laugh along with me. At the movie.

My favourite though, is the alternate ending. True enough, there is a additional scene in the alternate version but, if you choose to watch the alternate ending (which would likely be, as I did, immediately after having just watched the regular ending) you will first have to watch the entire last 6 minutes of the movie. Yes, 6 minutes. 360 seconds. I could make a movie of my face watching it and call it 360 seconds, my face was so contorted in disbelief that they would actually show the entire final 6 minutes with no changes whatsoever (not one) and then tack on a 2 minute section. I don't mind the 88 minutes, or the 2 minutes, it's those 6 minutes that killed me.

My 2nd grade ('3rd Form' as it was known in those days in that place) creative writing assignment was actually a lot better than this movie, I'll have to tell you about it sometime. It involved frogs, cowboys and, oddly enough, a crazy-haired Al Pacino.

I agree with everyone who's said this movie was bad, stunk, predictable, etc. Pacino running around with a Phil Spector-like "hairdo" was laughable. Alicia Witt, playing one of his students spouted out her lines as if she were reading at an audition. She gave a particularly atrocious acting job in this stinker, that I was really hoping she'd be the next victim to die. The little parts where Pacino is freaking-out, staring at his students, wondering if any one of them was involved in framing him was something out of a You Tube parody. Racing around town in a cab, with the cab driver calmly sitting in the back seat making his hundreds of bucks so that.............oh fergit it. Folks, this is a no-go.

Can't believe Pacino was in a movie this BAD and can't believe I actually watched it all the way to the end. Both plot and acting were terrible!!