88 Minutes

Review By: Michael Dance
MichaelDance@TheCinemaSource.com

88 Minutes is unfortunately not 88 minutes long. Even if you get up right when the end credits start, you're still looking at a commitment of more than 100 minutes, which is time you could've spent contracting a disease or banging your head into a wall.

It's not just bad. It's epically bad. It's laugh-derisively-at-the-screen-repeatedly bad. What could've been a crappy little suspense movie that you're too happy to forget is instead so blatantly terrible that it's bound to be that one movie aliens pick to watch when they come to Earth to judge whether the human race is worth saving or annihilating. We'll all be praying they choose Casablanca or Rudy or something, but they'll choose 88 Minutes, and 100 minutes later we'll be nothing but cinder.

Al Pacino, the involvement of whom is obviously the only reason this movie was ever made, stars as Dr. Jack Gramm, a forensic psychiatrist and college professor. A few years ago his psychiatric evaluation of serial killer Jon Forster (Neal McDonough) was enough to convince a jury to put Forster on death row; now, the day he's to be put to death, a copycat murder is discovered that casts doubt on Forster's guilt.

Oh, and one of Gramm's students is also found murdered. And somebody calls Gramm telling he has eighty-eight minutes to live. And Gramm's teaching assistant has an ex-boyfriend who's stalking her.

It's that last one that threw me off. Let's break down all the different plotlines happening at once: okay, the whole plotline with Forster and the copycat murder is just set-up. Gramm's dead student seems like it's unnecessarily cluttering the plot, but fine, whatever. The call telling him he has eighty-eight minutes to live is obviously the main plot of the film, and Gramm thinks it's someone working for Forster on the outside to get revenge, so, cool. Now why the heck is so much time devoted to an ex-boyfriend of Gramm's teaching assistant (Alicia Witt)? We keep going back to the ex-boyfriend, the ex-boyfriend, and that plotline goes nowhere. It's a red herring, I guess, but in a movie that has way too much going on (the feds are also starting to suspect Pacino, of what I'm not quite sure), it feels random and at odds with the tone of the rest of the movie.

What is the rest of the movie? Basically it's Pacino making a lot of phone calls. And I mean nonstop. He makes upwards of fifty phone calls in this movie, and that's a tame estimate – I almost said seventy-five. Since the movie