88 Minutes is a would-be-thriller so shabbily constructed the title may well refer to the amount of time spent on the screenplay.
In the film, Dr. Jack Gramm (Al Pacino) is a notable forensic psychiatrist and college professor whose testimony helped convict an accused serial killer, Jon Forster (Neal McDonough), despite a lack of hard physical evidence.
Nine years later, on the day of Forster’s scheduled execution, Gramm gets a mysterious phone call with a computerized voice informing him he has 88 minutes to live. He scrambles throughout Seattle investigating copycats of the Forster murders to determine whether or not he made the wrong decision or is just the victim of an elaborate set-up.
It’s an interesting enough premise. And in the hands of smarter filmmakers, 88 Minutes could have explored the self-doubt and guilt Gramm might feel about sending a man to die, whether he turned out to be right or wrong in the end.
Unfortunately, screenwriter Gary Scott Thompson’s most notable past work has been on The Fast and the Furious and sequel 2 Fast 2 Furious, works not known for their subtlety of plot or introspective characters.
Instead, the audience gets one of those movies in which the main character runs around town with a cell phone glued to his ear, attempting to decipher the labyrinthine scheme against him. Gramm juggles conversations with his assistant, detectives and the anonymous voice threatening him.
In one plausibility-straining scene, Gramm even calls MSNBC and is put live on air to confront Forster, who is conveniently in the middle of an extended sit-down interview.
Even though it would take a masterly display of technical filmmaking to salvage this screenplay, not all the blame can be placed on the writing. The film isn’t just poorly conceived, but poorly acted, shot and scored, too.
Alicia Witt, who plays Gramm’s teaching assistant, Kim, treats situations as terrifying as kidnapping, explosions and home invasions with the same slack-jawed indifference she does when reading Gramm’s PowerPoint slides.
The melodramatic filmmaking only further exposes the lifeless performances. Particularly embarrassing is an early moment of exposition, in which Gramm is told one of his students has been murdered. As he receives the news, a dramatic zoom-in is punctuated with a note from the soundtrack orchestra as he responds. This continues the next time he speaks, and the movie feels like a parody of dramas before the plot is even clear.
It doesn’t help Gramm is unethical and unsympathetic. When he hears one of the students has died, he deliberately pretends not to know and asks the class why she’s absent, hoping for someone to react strangely and implicate themselves. Rather than going straight the police, he dashes around town playing the hero, constantly endangering himself and others.
Gramm’s 88 minutes, by the way, takes up only about 75 minutes of screentime. Where did that missing quarter-hour go? Was it the part that sufficiently explained the film’s convoluted plot? Was it a scene in which Gramm suffers blunt head trauma, thus explaining his inability to make a single logical decision?
No one may ever know how those missing minutes changed the movie. Thankfully, the few minutes it takes to read this review can prevent potential moviegoers from wasting even one second on 88 Minutes.
Grade: F
