88 Minutes

I did a little test while watching “88 Minutes,” the new serial-killer thriller staring Al Pacino. When Pacino’s character, Dr. Jack Gramm, a forensic psychiatrist and college professor, receives a phone call from an “anonymous voice” saying he has 88 minutes to live, I set the timer on my phone to see if he did indeed have 88 minutes till he died, or killed those trying to do him in. More on this in a bit.

Gramm was the main witness in the case against Jon Forster, a man accused of a brutal murder and considered the killer in five other rape/murders. While apparently lacking a lot of physical evidence, Gramm’s testimony was enough to convict Forster, and he was sentenced to death. On the morning of the execution, Gramm receives the aforementioned call, and must race against time to find who is out to get him. Also throwing a kink into the already dicey situation is the fact that Forster is pushing hard for a stay of execution, and more and more people seem convinced of his innocence, and that Gramm had a personal vendetta against Forster.

Gramm enlists the help of various students, assistants, and colleagues in his attempt to catch his would-be-killer, but begins to see each of them through very paranoid eyes.

The content of “88 Minutes” is rather typical for this genre. Surprisingly though, there is very little profanity to speak of. I heard one F-word, and four or five GDs, but nothing else really. There is some very senseless nudity. In the beginning of the film, Jack wakes up to see the women he apparently spent the previous night with, doing nude stretching while brushing her teeth. This is brief, and there is also brief nudity later in a flashback. A few times women are seen kissing each other. The bodies of some of the female victims are seen in little clothing, and strung from a roof in various positions.

The violence is what you’d expect from a serial-killer/torturer type of film, but the violence wasn’t what made “88 Minutes” uncomfortable for me to watch. Call me old-fashioned, but I have ZERO desire to ever see a scene in any movie where victims are being tortured, and we have to watch the people screaming and begging for the killer to stop. I, also, don’t want to ever have to hear an audio-tape where a twelve-year-old is being murdered. We know these people are dead, we don’t need slow replays of how it happened. It’s senseless, and takes away from any story.

And, frankly, the story needed all the help it could get, because this is an AWFUL film; it doesn’t deserve a single star. To see Al Pacino try to make something of a dreadful script and a ridiculously corny plot is painful for the viewer. Gramm receives the first phone call telling him of his time left to live, and then the killer feels the need to call a few more times over the next 10 minutes, to apparently remind him that he has 81 minutes, then 77 minutes, etc.

He and his class are forced to evacuate the building, but not before someone has time to write on the overhead projector Gramm’s remaining time. Then, when he gets to the parking lot, he finds his car windows smashed to bits, and the new “time-tally” written on the back of his bumper. Had he never gone back to his car to see that, or gone 20 minutes later, would the killer have adjusted the time?? I was scratching my head trying to figure out why the killers would call Gramm telling him he has 30-ish minutes, but then try to blow up his car, which obviously would cheat Gramm out of his time, and ruin any opportunity for the killer to explain to Gramm before they kill him how they did it all.

We all know that in every movie like this, the killer HAS to spill the beans, so with that in mind, and with the clock ticking, we know Gramm isn’t actually in any danger until the very end, and therefore don’t care much. When the end does finally come, the stupidity of the explanation is frankly unfathomable, and embarrassing. Had this movie starred C-movie actors and actresses, it would have been a straight to video clunker, but somehow the likes of Al Pacino, Alicia Witt, Amy Brenneman, Leelee Sobieski, and William Forsythe were talked into tarnishing their names for a paycheck.

As the final minutes ticked away, and I was able to stop my timer, I was frankly very disappointed. It ended up being 77 minutes from the time Gramm got the call to the time the finale occurs. I wasn’t upset that I had been cheated out of 11 minutes. Honestly, I was quite happy that we weren’t subjected to any more of this dreck. But, in a movie that gets so many things horribly wrong, shouldn’t they have at least tried to synchronize the time the character is given to the time it takes us to watch it? In any case, this movie should be seen by nobody, and I can only hope by my wasting “88 Minutes” plus of my life, Christian audiences will not do the same.

Violence: Extreme / Profanity: Mild / Sex/Nudity: Moderate

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