88 Minutes
Any thriller, which runs almost 20 minutes longer than its title promises, clearly cannot be trusted.
Any thriller, which runs almost 20 minutes longer than its title promises, clearly cannot be trusted.
You'd be right to be wary of director Jon Avnet's second feature in as many weeks with leading man Al Pacino.
88 Minutes is nonsense from pedestrian opening to preposterous finale, coasting along on a series of ludicrous leaps of logic that screenwriter Gary Scott Thompson disingenuously passes off as twists.
If the film's premise is neat - a college professor receives an anonymous telephone call to inform him that he will be dead within two hours and must race against the clock to prevent his own demise - the execution is clumsy, bordering on inept.
It takes Pacino's hero the best part of quarter of an hour to comprehend the rules of the game and to play along, but it takes us mere seconds to spot the myriad flaws in Thompson's design.
When the ill-fated hero collects his Porsche from a parking garage, he finds it vandalized with 72 Minutes hand-scrawled on the trunk.
Our bewilderment, that the perpetrator could possibly pre-empt his movements with split second precision, is compounded when Pacino then drives across town and the vehicle magically self-heals damage to the bodywork and windows.
The actor also finds time in his protagonist's hectic schedule to reapply hair colourant: his visibly greying barnet is shiny and well tinted by the final showdown.
It's a bad sign when the leading man's roots hold more interest than performances or plot.
Forensic psychiatrist Dr Jack Gramm (Pacino) receives a series of bizarre calls on his mobile 'phone, just as his arch-nemesis, serial killer Jon Forster (Neal McDonough), launches one final appeal bid from Death Row.
'You have 88 minutes to live...
tick tock, Doc,' says an electronically altered voice as Jack tries to lead a morning seminar on criminal behaviour for a class of bright sparks including Kim (Alicia Witt), Lauren (Leelee Sobieski) and Mike (Benjamin McKenzie).
When Jack surmises the threat is genuine - the shifty motorcyclist (Stephen Moyer) stalking campus is the giveaway - he enlists the help of personal assistant Shelly (Amy Brenneman) to look for anyone potentially bearing a grudge.
College dean Carol (Deborah Kara Unger) becomes embroiled in the mystery, so too does FBI agent Frank Parks (William Forsythe) who asks the obvious question: 'Jesus, Jack, why 88 minutes?' It's tempting to hang up on Avnet's film but we remain dialled in, hoping Pacino's usual theatrics might enliven the tedium.
Regrettably, he's on auto-pilot, along with most co-stars who fail convince us that their two-dimensional characters aren't simple red herrings.
Guessing the perpetrator's identity comes down to a straight choice between the glaringly obvious and the least likely suspects.
We've all seen enough thrillers to know which candidate will soon be cackling defiantly, 'You look so totally clueless!' Screenwriter Thompson could almost be talking to himself.
Release Date: Friday 3 October 2008
Certificate: 15
Runtime: 107mins
