88 Minutes Review

There is one question this train wreck of a movie throws up thats worthy of any interest. What would you do if you had 88 minutes to live? Well I would hope that I live within an 88 minute radius of Jon Avnet so that I could kick him square in the balls. Hard. Because for the second time in as many weeks Jon 'best thing on my CV is the producer of the Mighty Ducks Trilogy' Avnet has vomited crap onto my screen. And he's pissed on Al Pacino's chips twice too.

After a series of quite unnecessarily horrible rapes and murders (shot more for titilation than to provoke a reaction of genuine shock) Al Pacino, forensic psychiatrist extraordinaire, puts away the bad guy with that underused skill of 'presenting the facts during a testimony'. The boo hiss, definitely did it, bad guy (Neal McDonough) turns to him once the verdict is read out and chillingly says "Tick, tock Doc". Ooooh time is running out for Mr.Pacino. So 9 years later, thats right 9 full years later (okay, including 3 leap years, possibly) Al gets a phone call telling him he has 88 minutes to live. Thats more like it.

Except its not. Because Al just goes about his daily business for 86 boring minutes until the killer finally shows his masterplan which, despite out hero being 'the greatest headshrinker in the world ever Vol.3', he walks straight into. But attacking this film for one such failing of plot logic would be to miss the point completely. For this is up there with Taken in the 'so unbelievably fucking terrible I couldn't stop laughing' camp of movie. Yeah, sure, Al is as dependable as ever (rarely does he put in a bad performance despite starring in some real turkeys) but sweet Holy Mama this film blows.

The camera work is awful (see the crash zoom in the courtroom. For. Absolutley. No. Reason), the dialogue is laughably bad, it contains some of the worst (and most pointless) flashbacks ever commited to celluloid and it plays the red herring trick in every single scene. This is all supposed to build up to an ending of The Usual Suspects style brilliance but falls short of even being as clever as a typical episode of the Hubba, Hubba, Hubbas in Hoobland. While Taken at least had the guts to be offensive and bad, 88 minutes is just bad. And that kind of offends me more.