Entertainment, Movies - Marine Corps Times

Film review: ‘88 Minutes,’ 1 star

The “ticking clock” film gambit — routinely played to exhausting effect on TV’s “24” — exerts an undeniable pull on our natural curiosity about whodunit and, equally important, how the culprit will be thwarted.

From the filmmaker’s point of view, unspooling the action in one long, real-time rush also whips up an artificial urgency that helps obscure crater-sized plot holes.

That’s a big boon for “88 Minutes,” which morphs into one big lump of stupid if you stop to think about it for even a second.

The story opens in 1997 with the brutal torture and murder of a young woman by a killer with the stunningly unoriginal nickname of the “Seattle Slayer.”

The case against the alleged killer, Jon Forster (Neal McDonough) is very flimsy: a sketchy physical description from the dead woman’s roommate, and the expert testimony of high-profile “forensic psychologist” Dr. Jack Gramm (Al Pacino, coming close to a career-low watermark).

But this is still enough to put Forster on death row, from where he alternately protests his innocence and hammers Gramm for giving false testimony.

Nine years on, with Forster just days from the big needle, a string of copycat murders erupts. Then, on the very morning of Forster’s execution day, Gramm is on his way to his university teaching gig when an anonymous caller tells him he has “88 minutes to live.”

Synchronize your watches!

Obviously, Forster is working with someone on the outside to get revenge on Gramm, and there’s no shortage of suspects.

They include three of Gramm’s students — alluring Kim (Alicia Witt), coolly cerebral Lauren (Leelee Sobieski) and caustic Mike (Benjamin McKenzie), as well as Kim’s abusive ex-husband (Stephen Moyer), who spent time in prison with Forster and has dropped off the police radar.

Gramm races around town like a headless chicken in pursuit of one red herring after another, while the killer calls every few minutes to taunt, “Tick-tock, doc,” and provide a time update.

But since Gramm is a condescending, egotistical gasbag (and Pacino plays him with bored indifference), it’s tough to work up much sympathy for his plight.

The film’s only real stab at character development is a brief foray into Gramm’s past in which we learn that he feels responsible for the torture and murder of his kid sister years earlier by a killer who (clue alert!) took a leisurely 88 minutes to do the deed.

All other traces of character development come out of left field at jarringly random intervals. In one scene, for example, we’re told that Gramm’s assistant Shelly (Amy Brenneman) is not only gay, but also his ex-wife.

Whowiththewhatnow?

No matter; we’re quickly off to other disparate plot threads, some of which hit truly ludicrous depths. My favorite such moment qualifies as an inanity trifecta:

1) MSNBC grants Forster a live interview on national TV hours before his execution. 2) Gramm calls in and is patched right through so he can bellow at Forster on live TV in a vain effort to bait his nemesis into admitting guilt. 3) Gramm just … hangs up.

Similarly, Gramm doesn’t zero in on the killer until he has only about, oh, nine minutes to live — and how he does it is something that would occur to any “Law & Order” fan right off the bat.

The killer’s unmasking is pitifully anticlimactic, which underscores the biggest potential “ticking clock” pitfall: That once the tick-tocks run out, viewers will feel outraged at having been suckered in to begin with.