Reviewed by Lamar Kukuk
4/23/08
“I want the kids in bed by nine, the
dog fed, the yard watered and the gate locked. And get a note to the milkman:
NO MORE CHEESE!”
-Steve McCrosky (Lloyd Bridges), Airplane!
I couldn't help thinking
of the man who picked the wrong week to quit sniffing glue repeatedly while
watching 88 Minutes, a luridly overcranked and utterly ridiculous
thriller that plays like an entire season of 24 compressed into
a hair under two hours. Unsavory serial murders and random assassination
attempts alternate with the bizarre, endless spectacle of Al Pacino on
his cell phone multitasking his way through enough suspects, evidence and
red herrings to fill a dozen thrillers, all en route to a solution easily
guessable without one single clue. For all its' overheated frenzy,
88 Minutes includes not a single minute of genuine entertainment,
except that sometimes it made me a little giggly.
We open with a sequence that
really wishes the Hostel sequel had done better: twin sisters
(their status as twins the first of many things that screams “CLUE!” but
is never followed up on) are drugged in their apartment, hung upside down
and subjected to assorted nastiness I no more want to describe than watch.
One is able to scream for help that arrives too late to save her sister,
but does scare off the assailant. She thinks she can pick him out
of a lineup and ends up IDing Jon Forster (Neal McDonough), who's convicted
in large part because of the expert testimony of forensic psychiatrist
Dr. Jack Graham (Al Pacino). Years later, on the date of Forster's
scheduled execution, strange things start to happen. One of Graham's
students turns up dead, murdered in exactly the same way as the earlier
“Seattle Slayer” (it was the guy who names serial killers' day off, I guess)
killings. Then, he gets a weird phone call telling him he has only
88 minutes to live. Then come the bomb threats, attacks on his students,
and attempts on his own life (gunfire, car bombs, etc.), all punctuated
with clever/improbable/flat-out impossible updates on the number of minutes
that remain. With grad student Kim (Alicia Witt) in tow, he gets
on his cell phone with trusty assistant Shelly (Amy Brenneman), FBI pal
Frank Parks (William Forthsythe) and that nasty audio-distorted voice and
starts demanding answers. Is Forster really innocent? What's
the connection of the 88 minute time limit to the decades-old death of
Graham's 12-year-old sister? Could the Slayer be Graham himself?
And how many barely-glimpsed characters can you keep the names of in your
head while struggling to stay awake?
I ask because if the answer
is “not many”, you might want to bring a pad and paper to 88 Minutes.
Whenever Graham's busy getting shot at or fending off Kim's advances, he's
got Shelly working the phones, ready to call back with a list of the current
whereabouts of everybody who rated an 8 or higher on “the Threat Scale”.
Granted, Pacino's on a short list of people who could escape 88 Minutes
with their dignity intact (and he does), but the force with which he keeps
plowing forward with his one-man Zodiac investigation
is pretty amusing given the compressed period of time in which it occurs.
But the movie is best off sticking to names and itineraries because whenever
it tries to add any meat to the Slayer case's bones, the results are not
good. Characters keep having to tell weird stories about their pasts:
from Kim's overprotective ex-husband to the utterly unsavory story about
Graham's sister to the reasons it mentions that Shelly was a lesbian when
we first meet her, Gary Scott Thompson's script is never able to resemble
the conversation, rhythm or lives of actual people.
Unfortunately, Director Jon
Avnet believes his best angle on this material is to keep pumping up the
tension and craziness so that every character (Graham included) seems like
a potential killer. That might work in a well-structured movie filled
with interesting characters and a really crackerjack mystery, but since
88 Minutes has none of the above, all keeping us at arms length
from everyone we're watching accomplishes is to make us less and less invested
in their fates. A lot of weird dangling threads hint at either heavy
reediting/rewriting on the spot or just plan shabbiness, like the new guy
at the front desk at Graham's building who's so clearly in disguise except
that I guess he wasn't. Speaking of comic highlights, just how could
Avnet and his editor Peter E. Berger possibly use a take of the car bomb
scene where Pacino seems to be taking advantage of having landed on top
of Witt to feel her up? I know the porcelain-skinned Cybill
actress has matured into quite the hottie, but come on, Al, be a professional!
But I can't blame one of
our greatest actors if his judgment seems impaired: he did, after
all, sign on for what is by a huge margin the worst film he has ever been
involved with. There's nothing to be done with the crazy Graham role
but put his head down and plow forward and that's exactly what he does,
even with nuttiness like a scene that calls for him to stop everyone he
sees in a parking garage and demand to see their hands. I felt kinda
bad for most of the actresses in a movie with such a queasy air of misogyny:
some of the victims' suffering is so overacted it's actually kinda funny,
but the Seattle Slayer's M.O. gets a little too much on-screen time for
my taste and is meant to be a bit too entertaining. Witt actually
holds her ground with Pacino pretty well and has as much luck as anyone
making her character seem complicated rather than contrived. Brenneman
has good Girl Friday chemistry with Pacino, but almost everything Shelly
says is either expositional boilerplate or worse. Deborah Kara Unger
has the least luck seeming like anything other than a plot point loon as
Pacino's boss and Leelee Sobieski has at first too little and then too
much to do as another of Graham's students. Forsythe does what he
does as a character with no internal logic (love the scene where he shouts
“I don't know who you are anymore!” and waves a gun at Graham only to then
agree to let him go when there's an arrest warrant out for him).
McDonough isn't on screen very much, but he does make the most of his few
scenes even though they too are mostly just silly (watch Graham call him
on National TV, yell at him for a few minutes and then switch to another
line without even signing off from the interview).
88 Minutes is bad,
so bad you have to remind yourself that the people involved surely set
out to make a good movie. Now all they can hope to do is turn the
page, as long as no copycat crimes begin when Avnet and Pacino reunite
for this fall's Righteous Kill. |
