Talk about underemployment. 88 Minutes lists nineteen (count 'em, 19!) producers in the credits. That works out to approximately 4½ minutes per producer. And, apparently, not one of them bothered to point out to the 18 others that the story they were telling in the movie they were making was a truckload of hooey.
Consider it pointed out.
88 Minutes, which actually runs 106 minutes and feels a heck of a lot longer, is a sorry suspense thriller and a wholesale whodunnit.
But by the time the villain is revealed, you'll be too busy deciding whether to give up moviegoing altogether to even notice. Or, as they say in the trade: Who done it? Who cares?
Jon Avnet (Fried Green Tomatoes, Up Close & Personal, Red Corner) is, as far as we know, the film's only director, for which I guess we should be grateful. But only the presence of a major star at the center of this preposterous tale makes the film watchable.
Al Pacino (right) stars as Dr. Jack Gramm, a world-famous forensic psychiatrist and Seattle college professor who is informed by the FBI that there's a copycat murderer on the loose who is imitating the crimes of serial killer and death-row inmate Jon Forster, in whose case Gramm was the witness for the prosecution and whom Gramm helped put away.
Then Gramm gets an unusual death threat from a mysterious killer, who keeps calling him on his cell phone ("Tick tock, doc") -- and telling him that he will die in 88 minutes and counting.
Can Gramm figure out who's calling and prevent his own demise? Hey, wait -- could Gramm be the killer?
On the eve of Forster's execution, another copycat murder occurs in the city, the victim a student of Gramm's. Did Gramm implicate the wrong guy? Or could Forster be pulling the strings from prison, with an accomplice on the outside?
The ersatz suspense, in the tradition of such "real time" countdown flicks as High Noon and Nick of Time, never even registers. And you get the distinct impression that there was lots of desperate post-production fiddling with this convoluted mess that made a bad movie even worse.
The lethargic Pacino, whose thoughts would appear to be elsewhere (perhaps they've wandered to his Oscar or his eight Oscar nominations, which probably seem a very long time ago), is so unfocused that he's barely there. If you look at him carefully, I believe you can detect glimmers of his contempt for the material and his hope that the film never sees the light of day.
Sorry, Al. Not that I don't share your feelings about this vehicle, but, hey, I'm just watching.
His supporting cast -- Amy Brenneman, Leelee Sobieski, Alicia Witt, William Forsythe, Deborah Kara Unger, and Neal McDonough among them -- go through the motions, none of them particularly dreadful but nobody quite managing to rise above the cellar-dwelling subject matter. Truth be told, Pacino's actual co-star is his cell phone.
Twists, suspects, red herrings, and plot holes abound in the almost insanely contrived and implausible script by Gary Scott Thompson, but nothing can breathe much life into this DOA time-waster which, instead of sporting a plot with internal (or even external) logic, just gives us more and more plot, most of it nonsensical, until we choke on it.
Director Avnet plays primarily to the zero-attention-span crowd. Attempting to distract us from the large hole in the middle of this small doughnut, he relies on whip pans and other darting camera movements as well as a parade of zooms to possible suspects, which includes virtually every character who shows up on screen.
What we're left with when the smoke clears is an unmistakable cruel streak and a climax so goofy, it's really just spoofy.
It wouldn't be fair to say that we get bored -- there's far too much going on, however bizarre and unexplainable, for that to be the case -- but we do grow weary of the film's modus operandi long before the final credits of this potboiler roll.
So we'll count down to 1½ stars out of 4 for this murderously incompetent beat-the-clock thriller. Tick tock, tick tock, 88 Minutes is schlock.
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Al Pacino (right) stars as Dr. Jack Gramm, a world-famous forensic psychiatrist and Seattle college professor who is informed by the FBI that there's a copycat murderer on the loose who is imitating the crimes of serial killer and death-row inmate Jon Forster, in whose case Gramm was the witness for the prosecution and whom Gramm helped put away.
