Al Pacino has been playing parts that he is 10 years too old for since at least 1998. In “88 Minutes,” a thriller that feels like it was written in less time than that, the 67-year-old Pacino plays a forensic psychiatrist who sleeps with women in their 30’s and does enough running around to wear out a sophomore track star.
It’s another film that you can tell was greenlit by the studio executives solely by the pitch, which likely read as follows: a forensic psychiatrist who helped put away a serial killer begins receiving phone calls counting down to his death, 88 minutes away. Faced off against a criminal mastermind, he must piece together the clues before his time is up.
Sounds fun, yes? Little of that to be found here. The film primarily consists of Pacino’s character and one of his grad students (Alicia Witt) running around with pistols searching for the killer. As a grad student myself, I know that I’d demand extra credit, or at least leniency come May.
The plot seems as if all the elements were poured into a shotgun shell and then blasted onto the pages of the script. There are conversations that don’t go anywhere, innumerable red herrings, characters that probably served a purpose before their scenes were cut during editing, and lots of 20 second conversations stretched to fit two minutes.
Pacino is undoubtedly a great actor, his name functioning as a pedigree harkening back to brilliant performance and piles of awards, but now he seems content to merely collect his paychecks. Not that he’s bad in this sort of role, but there are only two emotions to play: confident and angry.
The film can’t even get itself straight on Pacino’s character. Is he a flawed hero or a blowhard getting his just desserts? There are fewer cinematic sins worse than a film that can’t make up its own mind, and “88 Minutes” hasn’t a clue. Adding to the discomfort is a soundtrack that favors rap music (yeah, Pacino is so rap alright) and jerky edits that bombard the eye. It’s so convoluted that you must wonder if the slapdash appearance of the whole thing was the result of incompetence or pathetically misguided artistry.
All of this leads to a climax which makes no sense, but at least that’s consistent with the rest of it. At 108 minutes, it’s 18 minutes too long. Or 108, if you’d rather look at it that way, which I do.
1.5 out of 5
1 comments:
The plot seems as if all the elements were poured into a shotgun shell and then blasted onto the pages of the script.
That's a GREAT line, dude.
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