Midway through Columbia Pictures’ latest attempt at a blockbuster, “88 Minutes,” Al Pacino’s character is told by the one-dimensional villain to take a good look at his watch. These words spoke to me, so I took them to heart. For the next two hours of my life, which I will never get back, I found myself checking the time incessantly, hoping my pain and suffering would end soon. I’ll admit I went into this movie with big aspirations, but I left wondering if Al Pacino had finally done it. Had he finally joined the ranks of Bruce Willis and Robert De Niro: A-list actors who will settle for D-list roles?
The premise of the movie isn’t all that bad. In fact, on paper, writer Gary Scott Thompson, who wrote “The Fast and the Furious,” might have even convinced me that it could work. But somewhere between putting pen to paper and actually filming the movie, a lot was lost. Director Jon Avnet settles for a burned-out Al Pacino stumbling through a wordy script, accompanied by a knock-off Molly Ringwald as his co-star cohort, Alicia Witt. The script tries to weave some deep-seeded tale but fails and makes you wonder if the movie should have been axed down and just called “8 minutes.”

Pacino’s character, the infamous Dr. Jack Gramm, is supposed to be a forensic psychiatrist responsible for putting away the likes of some of the world’s most renowned serial killers; however, after watching the movie, you would never know that. Instead, Gramm appears to be more of a womanizing creeper of an old man who gets his kicks playing cops-and-robbers with the local authorities. And in doing so, he makes his fair share of enemies.
One of these enemies is death row inmate Jon Forster, played by Neal McDonough, who’s about to die by lethal injection as a result of Gramm’s testimony. But despite his being behind bars, someone is still roaming the streets of Seattle committing copycat killings of Forster’s work, leading the geniuses in law enforcement to immediately assume that Gramm’s testimony must be wrong and Forster must be innocent.
At the same time, Gramm receives a cryptic call from a robotic voice informing him he has just 88 minutes to live. Gramm, being the superhero psychiatrist he is, deduces that he, along with a handful of his grad students, would be best fit to solve the mystery, so for a vast majority of the movie he keeps anyone who might actually be fit to handle the job in the dark.
What ensues is a run-around of illogical twists and turns that drag on for far too long and set up an ending that I couldn’t make up if I tried. I won’t be a spoiler of this spoiled film, but I will say that if, and I do stress the “if,” you are able to make it to the end of this film, you will be blown away by just how bad a movie really can get.
If you’re forced to see this movie, then try to look for the few bright spots where Pacino gets irate and shows flashes of his days of yelling passionately in “Scent of a Woman.”
If you’re not forced to see it, then don’t. Save your money. Rent “The Godfather.”