88 Minutes
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Movie Reviews of 88 Minutes
Movie Review: If you've absolutely nothing else to do.
Summary: 2 Stars
Very flawed Pacino flick. Aside from that it wasn't really bottom of the barrel, close though.Movie Review: JAW-DROPPING BADNESS 0 OUT OF 10
Summary: 1 Stars
88 Minutes is the most inept, and quite frankly the worst thriller I have ever seen (Even worse than garbage like Left Behind! That's saying something!). Yes, this film is chock full of surprises and shocks, but not for reasons it originally intended. This film is so bad, that not only is it one of the most critically-reviled films of all time (5% Fresh on Rotten Tomatoes! Ouch!), but it was also so heinously bad that Sony Pictures didn't even want to release it. The same Sony Pictures which gifted mankind with garbage like Gigli and The Fog remake, as well as other bad flicks. Granted, it is not quite as bad as those other two flicks, but not by a whole lot (As shown by the zero rating), which is kind of like saying getting shot in the crotch with a handgun is less painful than say, getting shot in the crotch with a double-barreled shotgun. Either way it sucks, and you shouldn't even consider either options at hand.
WHAT IT'S ABOUT: The film starts off in the year 1997, in which a man named John Forster rapes and tortures two girls in their home, and ends up killing one of them. The other sister lives, and with the help of forensic psychiatrist named Jack Gramm, gets Forster convicted. Then, nine years later, Jack begins receiving threatening phone calls telling him that he has 88 minutes to live. So Jack must unravel the mystery behind who is trying to kill him and deal with his past through a stupid subplot about the murder of his sister when he was much younger, as well as developing lame sexual tension, and too many damn red herrings.
MUSIC: Bland, uneventful, and not worth mentioning. It's like everyone involved in every aspect of this film knew they were in a bad film so they didn't put forth any effort of any sort. When you make a thriller, the music should convey the mood of the film, and when things build up, the music should accompany it. Not so in this case, it's pretty much just shoe-horned into this abomination.
ACTING: Oh good Lord. Al Pacino, what are doing in here? You were in The Godfather and Scarface (Two great films), has your career fallen this much? I'm not expecting him to be on par with his performances in those films, but was it too much to get him to put effort into his role rather than just going through the motions to get a paycheck? No one else tries either, and there is no one worth mentioning. The only thing these actors are commendable for are how utterly terrible they all were.
ACTION: This film is brain-dead and so inept that it boggles the mind of the viewer. The plot seems to be convinced it's some intelligent (And perhaps even brilliant) thriller, so it decides to throw in as many red herrings as possible to throw off the viewer who stopped caring awhile ago. Not to mention this film has plot holes and inconsistencies (You have 88 minutes to live, but I'm going to try and kill you early! I'll blow up your car! I'll send like three different biker assassins to try and kill you! Perhaps even a suspicious ex of one of your student's might be trying to get you! Yes, my script is so good! I'll try to sound smart even though I can't write worth a damn!). By the time you find out who is behind trying to kill Jack, you just won't care and will just be thankful this pile of crap is finally over.
OVERALL: Pathetic, ridiculous, nonsensical, horribly boring, and just plain horrible, 88 Minutes is a nightmare of thriller cinema. It fails at everything it does, and what make it even worse is how it squanders the talent at-hand and is convinced it's some great thriller of sorts. If you like this film, you're an idiot.
THE GOOD: NOTHING. ABSOLUTELY NOTHING.
THE BAD: EVERYTHING.
Movie Review: Stale and overdone Pacino vehicle
Summary: 1 Stars
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.
Movie Review: Hall of Shame candidate
Summary: 1 Stars
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.
Movie Review: 88 Minutes Doesn't Deserve 108 Minutes of Your Time
Summary: 1 Stars
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.