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There is a certain expectation for a movie called 88 Minutes, particularly one that charts an 88-minute period in a man's life as he tries to unravel the mystery of who might be trying to kill him. That expectation, of course, is that the movie will be told in real time, that 88 Minutes will be 88 minutes long. But 88 Minutes has a pre-closing credit running time of roughly 100 minutes, which is just asinine. Why make a movie using the real time gimmick if it doesn't follow the gimmick? Who sits down to watch 60 Minutes on a Sunday night and blocks out an hour and a half to do it? The frustrating thing about 88 Minutes is that the film begins before the 88-minute countdown and takes so much time to set up that when the countdown actually starts, there's only 79 minutes left in the movie. Of course, everything that comes before the countdown could've been rolled into the film via backstory told while forensic psychiatrist on the run Al Pacino is driving from one side of Seattle to the other. Having addressed that, by the way, there's way too much scattered action for a movie that's supposed to take place in an hour and a half of real time. Why is Pacino being chased, you might ask. Well, his testimony was pivotal in convicting a serial killer (Neal McDonough) ten years earlier, and now that his death sentence is about to be commuted, a copycat serial killer is terrorizing Seattle and the psychiatrist with what he can only assume he hatched as a sick and twisted game. Or is it the real serial killer and did the psychiatrist send an innocent man to prison? 88 Minutes wants to tell you the answer, but not as much as it wants you to try to outguess it, leaving the movie free to throw all logic out the window, substituting it with any damn psychobabble rationale and plot twist it can imagine. Once you dismiss the movie as being a bad experiment, it's actually not awful for about 30 minutes, which in the movie's chronology is about 39-44 minutes. But the idea is betrayed by the ponderous execution and an ending that makes less sense than the ones you devise on you own.
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88 Minutes Starring Al Pacino, Alicia Witt, and Leelee Sobieski Directed by Jon Avnet Rated R Review by Colin Boyd April 18, 2008
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