STUDIO: Sony
RELEASE DATE: September 16, 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
FEATURES: Alternate Ending
Commentary with Director Jon Avnet
Director's Point of View
The Character Within

Righteous Kill may have opened somewhat respectably (considering the horrendous reviews) in third place this past weekend, but it's not the only Al Pacino & Jon Avnet vehicle hitting the market this week and probably only the second-worst. Avnet and Pacino worked together before on the horrendous 88 Minutes, a film that came and went without much more than a derisive chuckle earlier this year and that is hitting Blu-Ray this week. The teaming of Pacino and Robert De Niro in Righteous Kill has made comparisons between the actors inevitable. So, in Bobby D's filmography, are you familiar with Godsend, Hide and Seek and 15 Minutes? Those films are to De Niro's career as 88 Minutes is to Pacino's. De Niro long ago disappeared into crapville, losing the former actor who once sparked so many imaginations by allowing himself to paycheck his way through bad productions, but Pacino always kept his head above the fray. Even in troubled vehicles like Two For the Money or The Recruit, you could usually say "See it for Al." Even he gets sucked up by the failure of the worst film of his career in 88 Minutes. It's the first time that Pacino has been overwhelmed by the awfulness of what surrounds him and simply drowns in the tide of junk.

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). To add credence to this theory, the Blu-Ray for 88 Minutes includes an alternate ending. Surprise, surprise. Alternate endings on bad movies almost always give me the impression that the writers and actors had no idea what they were doing while they were shooting.

88 Minutes goes from bad to painful pretty quickly and I'm far from alone in that assessment. The stunning 6% on Rotten Tomatoes says it all with Richard Roeper calling it "The worst movie of 2008 so far." Peter Howell of The Toronto Star said, "This movie is Battlefield Earth bad. It's 10,000 B.C. bad. It's bad with a side of fries and a cherry cola." Perhaps The New York Daily News said it best with this quotable quip, "This slimy, slug-minded mystery thriller starts out dead on arrival and then, like three-day-old fish, gets really bad really fast. And it stays bad, ensnaring its star and every other cast member in its wretched net."

An almost-sure resident on my worst ten list of 2008 is hard to recommend in any fashion on the home market but, and we've said this before, if you ARE going to watch 88 Minutes - and thousands of people are likely to be intrigued considering this is a genre that often does well on DVD - you should watch it on Blu-Ray. Sony still leads the video market in the next-gen format and 88 Minutes does look and sound great. Sony seems to have a leg up in Blu-Ray with Warner Brothers and Dreamworks nipping at their heels with some recent beautiful presentations. As for special features, 88 Minutes does have much more than one would expect for such a failure, including two featurettes, the aforementioned alternate ending, and a commentary with Mr. Avnet. Of course, to listen to the commentary, you'd have to watch 88 Minutes again. Good luck.