MOVIE: 88 Minutes (2008)

This absolutely horrendous movie had just enough flaws to be absolutely horrendous, but not enough flaws to be delightfully so.  That’s always such a fine line, you know?  It’s dangerous to tread so close to it.  But really, the only thing that could’ve tipped this movie from “absolutely horrendous” to “horrendously enjoyable” would’ve been the sudden appearance of zombies, and it only took me about ten minutes to recognize the writers, producers, directors, and certainly the ACTORS were taking this movie FAR too seriously for those kind of shenanigans.

Wherein lay their problem.

This lame flick is about a forensic psychiatrist named Jack Gramm (Pacino) who, as the movie opens, is about to provide the testimony that puts a vicious serial killer named Jon Forster (played by Neal McDonough — dude, run your next project by me before you sign the contract, okay?) in the electric chair.  Forster has always claimed he was innocent and that Dr. Gramm lied on the stand.  But Gramm was believable enough to sway the jury, and it didn’t take them long to come back with the death sentence.

A few years later, Dr. Gramm is teaching a college course on forensic psychiatry when he gets a phone call from the killer in the movie Scream (sounded like!).  The killer rasps that Gramm’s got 88 minutes to live, and then utters the words intended to strike fear into all our hearts:  “Tick-tock, doc.”  (Ooh, the killer’s a poet and he don’t know it!)

And so begin the longest 88 minutes of Dr. Gramm’s life.

Which not-so-coincidentally, were also the longest 88 minutes of MY life.

As Dr. Gramm struggles to find out who wants him dead and why, he gets a call from a cop buddy who says a woman has just been discovered, killed in the same way Forster always killed his victims.  Is it a copycat killer?  Or was Forster really innocent, in which case, perhaps they ought to stop his execution, which is about to take place any ol’ day now?  The answer, quite obvious to us viewers, takes Dr. Gramm, MD, PhD over an hour to figure out, which just goes to show you how useful higher education is these days.

Should’ve watched more Robbie Coltrane in Cracker and skipped graduate school, I guess.  He would’ve had the case cracked a lot faster.  Cuz, like, duh already.  God.

But even though this movie was completely predictable and inane and full of all kinds of very, very silly dialogue and ARGH-inducingly-stupid plot elements, it MIGHT have been watchable had Al Pacino not been so ridiculously awful in it.  I’m going to have to go back now and rewatch some of his great older films (Dog Day Afternoon, an old fave of mine, for example) and figure out if Pacino always acted like this and I just didn’t mind when he was younger, or if this is some new thing he’s doing.  But he was almost like an SNL spoof of himself here — the way he delivered his lines and moved his hands and head when he spoke.  It was weird.

Hey, wait, maybe it wasn’t really Al Pacino, but a robot that had been programmed to be Al Pacino?  That might explain the excessive exaggeration of his Al Pacino-ness.  Or else maybe he just really stinks now, in which case, let’s hope he decides to retire before he makes a TOTAL baffoon out of himself.

Al, man, next time, ADD THE ZOMBIES.  Save yourself!

[Don't Netflix me | And certainly don't buy me, what're you, nuts?]

Genre:  Thriller, Crap
Cast:  Al Pacino, Amy Brenneman, Benjamin McKenzie, Alicia Witt, Leelee Sobieski, Neal McDonough

Tags: Crap, Thriller