88 Minutes Inspires Critics

One of the upsides of a bomb like 88 Minutes is that it inspires critics to pan it with pleasure, zest, and outright glee. Six per cent on the Tomatometer is about as low as you can go. (UPDATE: Patrick Goldstein examines the plight of the older actor trying to meet his asking price in Hollywood.)

On Ebert & Roeper, Michael Phillips and Richard Roeper actually agreed that this was not only the worst movie of the year so far and Al Pacino's worst movie ever but probably one of the worst movies of all time, period.

Todd McCarthy in Variety writes:

"88 Minutes" can't even live up to its title. With 19 -- count 'em, 19 -- producers, including director Jon Avnet, ensuring that every aspect of the film, from the script to the star's haircut, is ludicrous in the extreme, the picture easily snatches from "Revolution" the prize as Al Pacino's career worst. Available on DVD in some territories as early as February 2007 and rolled out theatrically in France and elsewhere beginning in May of last year, this gape-inducing fiasco is getting a token domestic release that at least saves its star the indignity of a dump straight to homevid.

In a similar vein, The New Yorker's Anthony Lane writes:

The best thing about “88 Minutes” is the title. Jon Avnet’s movie bumble along for twenty minutes, at which point Dr. Jack Gramm (Al Pacino) is informed by a gravelly phone call that he has eighty-eight minutes to live. We then switch into real time, and the countdown begins, allowing us to calibrate precisely how much more of the film we have to suffer through. Avnet is setting a noble example here: if all movies were named after their running times Hollywood would instantly become a brisker place. Would Peter Jackson have dared to put us through a Tolkien trilogy called “Nine and a Quarter Hours of Elves”? I don’t think so.

Gramm is a forensic psychiatrist, who majors in serial killers. A nutcase (Neal McDonough) is in jail, awaiting execution, yet crimes identical to his are being perpetrated on the outside, and Gramm, who testified against him, is being simultaneously framed and hunted down. What follows makes absolutely no sense—a buzzing, fidgety mess of bad cinema, with people barking inquiries over their cell phones instead of enjoying what used to be called conversation. There is no basis for the criminal motives, no excuse for the slavering closeups of sadism wielded against women, and no reason that Pacino should have paused before feeding the script into his shredder. I sense a weariness in his features—an insomnia of the soul, as it were—that has nothing to do with his character and everything, I suspect, to do with his feelings for an industry that can pay him good money to prop up junk. Compare “88 Minutes” with “Sea of Love,” another murder mystery that Pacino made, in 1989, and you find him sporting the same loud ties, but everything else has leached away: suspense, credibility, wit, and the lost art of flirtation. As a result, nothing would give me keener pleasure than to reveal the identity of the killer, but a day after seeing the film I have genuinely forgotten. It was either a man or a woman, but beyond that everything is a blur. “It’s my job to be convincing,” Dr. Gramm explains. Sorry, Doc. You’re fired.

Comments

[mitkid]

I saw Pacino on Letterman, and to me it seemed like he knew the movie was a dog and was going through the motions. Rather like his acting career over the last decade.