STUDIO: TriStar
RELEASE DATE: April 18, 2008
STARRING: Al Pacino, Alicia Witt, Leelee Sobieski, Amy Brenneman, William Forsythe, Benjamin McKenzie, Deborah Kara Unger, and Neal McDonough
WRITTEN BY: Gary Scott Thompson
DIRECTED BY: Jon Avnet
GENRE: Thriller
RATING: R

Let's get this out of the way - "88 Minutes is at least 80 minutes too long!" Sorry, it was too easy. Pull that quote and put it on your ad. Moving on... Much has been written about the late-career choices of Robert De Niro and Al Pacino, especially with the imminent arrival of their latest collaboration, Righteous Kill, a choice that looks a lot more suspect now that the same director's 88 Minutes is slouching into theaters this weekend. I've always held the side that there's no debate as to who's gotten lazier as an actor - De Niro wins in a landslide. Bobby D has allowed himself to literally disappear as an actor in awful films like Godsend, Hide and Seek, and 15 Minutes, barely giving the minimum effort and bringing nothing of substance to the roles. Al Pacino has been in some awful movies in the last two decades, but, as one of the greatest actors that ever lived, he has somehow found a way to remain above the fray. Even in failures like The Recruit, Two For the Money, and The Devil's Advocate - Pacino was the best thing about those movies, a claim that can not be made about many of De Niro's hot messes. So, that is why it brings me great sadness to be the bearer of bad news about Sir Al Pacino (if we knighted 'em over here like they do over there, Al certainly would have gotten the call) - 88 Minutes is arguably his worst film ever. It's the first time that Pacino is overwhelmed by the awfulness of what surrounds him and simply drowns in the tide of bullsh*t, making this one of the only times that we can't even say "See it for Al."

Despite the failure of even his work, the one thing I can say is that the brunt of the blame for 88 Minutes doesn't fall at the feet of Pacino. If anything he's merely carried away by a screenplay riddled with plot holes and unbelievable characters and a director who hasn't graduated from the kinetic music-video style he employed in the '90s. In 88 Minutes, Pacino stars as Jack Gramm, a forensic psychiatrist who is "celebrating" the imminent execution of the murderer in one of his biggest cases, Jon Forster (Neal McDonough, who's wasted in a one-room role, but the whole cast is, so why quibble?). It was Gramm's testimony that put Forster inches from the bad side of a lethal injection syringe and, on the morning of the big day, a murder occurs that bears a striking similarity to Forster's M.O. Did Gramm get it wrong? Or is a copycat trying to shed doubt on the case to get a stay of execution? While Jack is deliberating the possibilities, he gets a phone call telling him he has 88 minutes to live. Who's on the other end? Jack suspects his assistant, Kim (Alicia Witt). or possibly one of his students played by Leelee Sobieski and Benjamin McKenzie, but, in all actuality, it could be anybody.

And I mean that quite literally. It's one of those screenplays where you get the feeling that three or four different endings were shot, all of which could be explained through a "tying-up loose ends" phone call at the end (which, to no one's surprise, actually happens in 88 Minutes), and then test audiences picked the one they liked the most (or, more likely, hated the least). Even worse, 88 Minutes never even remotely plays in a realistic or logical world. Even the "24-esque" concept is wasted as the "real-time" conceit is ridiculously employed - No one could accomplish what Gramm does in 88 minutes in even 288 minutes. With non-existent character motivations - at one point, Jack stops to tell a 5-minute story for no one's sake but the audience's - stilted dialogue, cliched action, and more than one wasted actor, 88 Minutes goes from nonsensical to painful pretty quickly. And Jon Avnet really doesn't help, shooting the whole thing with as many traps of the genre as possible - an overly loud score, zoom cuts, and more ridiculous red herrings than any thriller fan deserves. The ceaseless music and zoom cuts become so oppressive that it literally feels like Pacino can actually see and hear them, and that's what's supposed to build his character's tension. It certainly won't build the audience's, who are far more likely to be laughing or sleeping than sitting on the edge of their seats.