Product Description

Genre: Drama
Rating: R
Release Date: 16-SEP-2008
Media Type: DVD

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #14275 in DVD
• Brand: PACINO,AL
• Released on: 2008-09-16
• Rating: R (Restricted)
• Aspect ratio: 2.35:1
• Formats: AC-3, Color, Dolby, Dubbed, DVD, Subtitled, Widescreen, NTSC
• Original language: English
• Subtitled in: English, French
• Dubbed in: French
• Number of discs: 1
• Dimensions: .25 pounds
• Running time: 108 minutes

Amazon.com
Al Pacino looks startled through much of 88 Minutes, as though taken by surprise at being cast in a thriller that must've first passed across the desks of Clint Eastwood and Harrison Ford. Still, Pacino brings his usual oomph to the role of a Seattle forensic psychiatrist, whose testimony secured the death sentence for a crazy serial killer (Neal McDonough). Wouldn't you know it, the very day the killer is sentenced to die, a copycat "Seattle Slayer" is on the loose, and Pacino starts getting ominous phone calls telling him the exact time of his own death. Tick tock: it's 88 minutes away. The film then serves up more red herrings than a Stalingrad fish fry, as possible culprits pop up every five minutes or so (among them an attractive group of med-school students played by Alicia Witt, Leelee Sobieski, and Benjamin McKenzie). Lapses in logic abound, but if you hunker down and zone in on Pacino's weary-eyed, poufy-haired professionalism, you can enjoy the goings-on. (They even make him run up flights of stairs, which one would have thought beyond him now.) Seattle's frequent stunt double, Vancouver, B.C., stands in as a location, and Jon Avnet supplies the slick direction. The cast is talented (including Amy Brenneman), leading you to guess that a lot of people will do anything just to work with Al Pacino. And you've got to admire Pacino's chutzpah at sharing the screen with statuesque actresses such as Brenneman and Sobieski; they tower over him, but he still holds his own. --Robert Horton

Stills from 88 Minutes (click for larger image)

Customer Reviews

Stale and overdone Pacino vehicle
88 Minutes is a tried and true "whodunit" shock/thriller clone that may entertain briefly but is at best a guilty pleasure. The story is a Hollywood teaser line: A renown forensic psychologist (Pacino) testifies against a serial killer and then 9 years later on the day of the killer's execution gets a phone call that he has 88 minutes to live.

This may be enough to get Hollywood producers frothing at the mouth and shelling out money, but this is a classic case of a movie that should have stayed a trailer-- the concept fits best into a 30-second package. Watching this movie is like eating a stale doughnut: You see it in the box with all of yesterdays crumbs and think, "That can't be very good, but I want it." You eat it. And then you regret it until the next stale doughnut comes along.

There are 3 main problems to this movie:

1. Pacino plays Pacino: Like Harrison Ford and Clint Eastwood, Al Pacino is getting old (sorry, but it's true). This movie showcases that by juxtaposing him with a class of young co-eds that he supposedly teaches psychology to and having him flirt with them in a decidedly "dirty old man" way. Never in this movie do you think "This is Dr. Gramm, the brilliant and famous forensic psychologist." No, this is Al Pacino stumbling around and yelling into a cell phone every five minutes. As the plot unfolds (more on that later), Pacino combats the killer with cantankerous "hoo-ha!" instead of a psychologist's keen insight. And after the movie nobody even remembers his character's name; it's just Pacino. That might be ok, except that it's an old, grumpy Pacino who refuses to be filmed opposite a female over the age of 25.

2. The Plot: This is an Agatha Christie whodunit with all the investigating stripped out and replaced with shock/gore. It starts with the initial murder which has that sicko-rapist creepiness, and then once it gets going with the "88 minutes" it's just one red herring suspect after another (complete with altered flashbacks and ominous music when you see them).

3. Lack of Characters: There aren't any characters in this movie. Period. There's Pacino playing himself. There are a bunch of vapid co-eds. There's a generic serial killer with no personality (other than he likes to kill/rape people). And that's it. Pacino gets a tragic backstory, but it's the same family trauma crap we see in every crime protagonist. Everyone else is just window dressing: victims, suspects, people for Pacino to say "Hoo-ha!" to on the cell phone (I think at its core this is a cell phone commercial).

In short, unless you really like Pacino and cell phones and wonder how much Hollywood makeup can make him look like a leading man again (similar to the morbid curiosity of watching the last Indiana Jones movie), don't rent or buy this movie.

Worse than my 2nd grade creative writing assignment
Wow, this was terrible. Almost impressively so. Red Herrings? Hah, mildly pink tadpoles is more like it. There alleged twists and potential suspects are so thin that it only occured to me after the fact that I was supposed to take them seriously.

It's never a good idea to have the main character be a complete moron. My favourite scene is the one where he spies a suspicious character for the 4th time (he'd chased him the 3rd time but lost him) and just watches him walk away without doing anything. ("Hmm, you got away this time mystery-man because my car is this way, and you're walking that way...")

I have a long list of scenes from this movie that I love to hate. ("I wonder where he went after the party." Oh wait, he was at the party? So that guy was your ex? Perhaps we should have established that before moving on to where he went after the party?) But I can't go into them all here because it's only fun if you've seen the movie and want to laugh along with me. At the movie.

My favourite though, is the alternate ending. True enough, there is a additional scene in the alternate version but, if you choose to watch the alternate ending (which would likely be, as I did, immediately after having just watched the regular ending) you will first have to watch the entire last 6 minutes of the movie. Yes, 6 minutes. 360 seconds. I could make a movie of my face watching it and call it 360 seconds, my face was so contorted in disbelief that they would actually show the entire final 6 minutes with no changes whatsoever (not one) and then tack on a 2 minute section. I don't mind the 88 minutes, or the 2 minutes, it's those 6 minutes that killed me.

My 2nd grade ('3rd Form' as it was known in those days in that place) creative writing assignment was actually a lot better than this movie, I'll have to tell you about it sometime. It involved frogs, cowboys and, oddly enough, a crazy-haired Al Pacino.

Can't Believe It?
Can't believe Pacino was in a movie this BAD and can't believe I actually watched it all the way to the end. Both plot and acting were terrible!!