Jon Avnet directs Al Pacino in the thriller 88 Minutes. Pacino plays university professor Jack Gramm, who occasionally assists the FBI in matters of forensic psychiatry. His recent testimony against a freshly convicted criminal seems to be the reason he has gotten a scary phone call informing him he will die in 88 minutes. As with the like-minded thriller D.O.A. (both the original and the remake), the protagonist must use his skills in order to track down who has hatched this evil plot and
hopefully prevent his own demise. Alicia Witt and Leelee Sobieski co-star as the professor's star students. ~ Perry Seibert, Rovi
If you like your women half-naked, strung upside-down from pulleys, and sliced like deli meat, this is the movie for you. Whether the victims are more tortured than the plot is a serious question.
Lacking tension in its setting and empathy for its characters, 88 Minutes is a woeful excuse of a thriller thanks to the inept direction by Jon Avnet, who has forgotten to inject emotion and thrills in what can only be described as a bloated crime movie.
88 Minutes is the sort of overblown thriller in which every action, no matter how insignificant, is pregnant with portent, yet it's a film of nothing but red herrings.
The overwrought production, sieve-like plot and ludicrous characters merge into something genuinely hilarious. But that's clearly not what cast and crew were going for.
Ridiculous and ultimately disappointing thriller that stays just about watchable thanks to an amusing pair of performances by Shouty Al and his hairpiece.
It's called Eighty Eight minutes. But, in fact, it's one hundred and seven minutes of your life that you lose should you persevere with this witless thriller.
Interestingly, the more overblown and insincere a performance Pacino delivers in a film, the more self-important and bouffant his hair gets. Here, it's so towering it takes up 90 per cent of the screen.
Now that this stupendously inept serial-killer flick has slithered into theaters, the diminutive legend had better clear room in his closet for another cinematic skeleton.
It verges on so-bad-it's-good territory, but just isn't entertaining enough. Lacking in tension and pace, poorly edited and starring wholly unsympathetic characters, this is just dull, drab and boring.
The kindest thing one can say is that director Jon Avnet and screenwriter Gary Scott Thompson bought a flatpack version of a thriller and then couldn't follow the instructions. Manuals can be confusing.
Pacino made me stick with it, and supporting players Alicia Witt and Neil McDonough weren't entirely awful. As for the rest of it... ugh. Terrible direction, and "Seattle" was so obviously Vancouver (with Canada Post trucks, Roots and Shoppers Drug Mart storefronts on the skyline and newsboxes for 24 Hours and Dose
cropping up) that it hurt. Lazy location scouts, to say the least.
The film had enough action and a still-got-it Pacino at its core, but it undercut every exciting scene with lengthy explanations of what was going on, which repeatedly killed the flick's momentum. What would also be interesting would a culprit with a motive, or an actor with more talent than Leelee Sobieski (that would be an actor with any talent whatsoever). The worst part of the film was the purported climax, and unfortunately, it overwhelmed the few bright spots the film had shown so far. Beyond Pacino, this one's a dud.
88 Minutes is the worst film of 2008. The film considering who was involved (Al Pacino) such a cinematic legend might of been good. Unfortunately, it wasn't this film is one of the worst films I have ever seen. The film also proves that even the greatest actors can make beyond aweful films. 88 Minutes relies on every
crime cliche in crime thrillers, but unfortunately, this is a predictable piece of trash, because after all, we've seen it all before. Overused cliche as in the person youleast expect is the killer and so on. This is a pile of shit that should've never been made.
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