'88 Minutes' is, well, Eighty-Eight Minutes Too Long

by Brett Parker

Picture an Oscar-winning acting legend trapped in a clumsy high school production and you’ll get a feel for what watching 88 Minutes is like. The always-wonderful Al Pacino finds himself in a thriller so crude and cheap that we’d be laughing if the script weren’t so insulting to our intelligence. Everything about this film is a mess, from the acting right down to the music. When early reviews trashed this film, I asked “could it really be that bad?” Yes, it is that bad! This is hands-down the worst Al Pacino movie I’ve ever seen.

Pacino stars as Dr. Jack Graham, a forensics psychologist who, as the film opens, helps to put an alleged serial killer named Jon Forster (Neal McDonough) behind bars by testifying at his trial. Through Graham’s expert opinion, the court is able to find Forster guilty and sentence him to death. Years pass and Graham now teaches his trade at a local university. One day on his way to class, he receives a phone call from a distorted, threatening voice informing him that he has exactly eighty-eight minutes to live.

This turns out to be the least of his problems. People in Graham’s life start to turn up dead, very much in the same fashion Forster killed people. Evidence is manipulated to make it look like Graham is up to something murderous. Graham believes whoever is trying to mess with him has strong connections to Forster, or in fact could be Forster himself. He tries desperately to figure out the chaos around him all while the clock ticks down to his alleged death.

All of this may sound like an intriguing plot, but 88 Minutes manages to fail miserably at every aspect of this production. Most of this is due to the fact that we are presented with one of the worst serial killer schemes in recent memory. The mystery killer doesn’t really execute a well-planned, precise death trap so much as hurl random mayhem in Graham’s direction. So many sloppy curve balls are thrown at Graham that there’s no way the audience can keep track of everything. It seems impossible for the killer’s plan to hold up. If we gave every development a second thought, we’d probably be able to see all the holes it truly has. When the mystery killer is finally revealed along with the big scheme, we realize once and for all that this enterprise is too preposterous to be plausible. I guess that’s one interesting way to look at the material: most thrillers contain plots around criminal masterminds. Here’s one centered on a criminal idiot.

It’s hard watching a movie where characters with highly-skilled personas make incredibly stupid decisions. The acting certainly doesn’t help. This movie is filled to the brim with laughable performances. I can’t remember the last time I saw so many unconvincing secondary performances in a single Hollywood film. These third-rate performers look even worse while standing next to Pacino, who also seems to be phoning it in. In a mediocre film, you can always depend on Pacino to add color and fire by hamming it up when need be. Here, we don’t get so lucky. Pacino is way too relaxed and casual, looking desperately like he wants to be elsewhere. It’s not a focused, realized performance, nor does it have the colorful dialogue or explosive delivery of his over-the-top fun roles. The only performances that work come from William Forsythe as Graham’s straight-forward police colleague and Benjamin McKenzie as one of Graham’s suspicious students. I also give serious credit to Alicia Witt who is competent while playing a character with an absolutely ludicrous background.

I found frustration at pretty much every turn in this movie. From the rushed editing to the distracting soundtrack (Backstreet Boys, Limp Bizkit, and Bubba Sparxxx don’t exactly fit in a serious thriller, do they?), it’s almost astonishing the ways in which this thriller fails. How they ever got a talent like Al Pacino into this project is beyond me. He may have had some misfires before, but even Gigli was more realized than this disaster. This makes I Know Who Killed Me look like a Hitchcock film.