Posted: Apr 20, 08 5:47pm
I really like movies, so it's usually pretty hard for me to really trash one. Unfortunately, 88 Minutes was not a good movie experience and so here goes:
Al Pacino plays a forensic psychiatrist whose testimony put a brutal serial killer on death row. On the day of the execution he receives a threatening, voice-altered phone call telling him he wil die in 88 minutes, and the suspense is supposed to take off from there. He receives many more messages as the movie continues, warning him that his time is running out and counting off the minutes.
Pacino is surrounded by an able cast (Alicia Witt from The Upside of Anger, LeeLee Sobieski from Joyride, Amy Brenneman from NYPD Blue, Deborah Kara Unger from The Game, and William Forsythe from a whole LOT of things), and the plot is intriguing. Neal McDonough (from "Boomtown" and "Band of Brothers") is chilling as the (wrongly?) convicted kiler watching his own time run out on death row, and Pacino is believable as the egotistical celebrity-academician whose veracity is called increasingly into doubt.
The suspense dies out pretty fast, however, as a series of questionable decisions made by many of the characters leaves the viewer asking, "Why did they do that"" instead of, "Is he/she the one making the phone calls to Pacino?" Even if I didn't ask either of those questions, I would still have to ask why Pacino's character didn't run for the police right after finding out he had 88 minutes to live.
Did anyone else see this? I've been known to disagree with the prevailing wisdom on a few movies, and with a cast this good I hope I'm wrong, but I found that Pacino wasn't the only one looking at the clock and wondering when this was all going to be over.
