88 Minutes

I've had this movie since May '07. "But how can that be?" you might be asking yourself, "It doesn't come out in theaters until next Friday." My answer: I have ways, man. WAYS.

Also I have the internet, which comprises approximately 100% of my "ways."

As it turns out, 88 Minutes has a long history. It was made in 2005, slotted for a 2006 release, then shelved and scheduled for a 2007 direct-to-DVD release. When the threat of the writers' strike became evident, Sony decided to hold off on the DVD release, in case it had to do a theatrical release to fill in the product void a writers' strike would create. The strike did happen, the void exists, and 88 Minutes hits theaters next Friday.

I watched this movie less out of an interest in the plot (the trailers made it look like a run-of-the-mill thriller), but because the cast appealed to me. Al Pacino, Leelee Sobieski, Alicia Witt, Amy Brenneman, Debora Kara-Unger, William Forsythe, Neal McDonough, and Battlestar Galactica's Leah Cairns (I have a crush).

Sweet crap 88 Minutes is awful. Maybe not Uwe Boll-awful, but certainly Reindeer Games-awful. Pacino appears to be talking while asleep, Alicia Witt seems to either be mixing uppers and downers or is bi-polar, Leelee Sobieski appears to have shot her scenes out of sequence over a 3-year period where she was slowly gaining weight, and William Forsythe (who is one of cinema's all-time-great heavies) is taking the same nap as Pacino. Brenneman doesn't totally embarrass herself, but isn't memorable. Deborah Kara-Unger has all of 3 minutes onscreen, and can't screw up too badly because she has nothing to screw up. Neal McDonough is always good, and is the standout here. And the highlight of the entire film is Leah Cairn's sweet, sweet ass. Said ass gets about a minute of screentime in the beginning, and the film goes downhill from there.

And the plot? Al Pacino gets a cell phone call from someone who tells him he has 88 minutes to live. Paranoia and murder ensues. The film throws in so many obvious thriller cliches that it actually does become hard to spot the eventual twist. This happens not because of style, but because the movie is so filled with cliches that up until the final reveal, the writer could literally just pick any character out of the bunch to be the killer and have a complete motive and backstory. I watched it with my wife, and I was constantly calling out what I thought the outcome will be. With about 15 minutes left in the movie, I paused it and laid out at least 5 wildly different scenarios that could be the eventual twist. It's bad enough when one ending is predictable, but when I can watch a movie and know every single way the plot could possibly go, that's just terrible, terrible filmmaking.

And what's worse is that the director of this film, Jon Avnet, is also the director of the upcoming thriller Righteous Kill, which will reunite Al Pacino with Robert De Niro. Pacino and De Niro finally together again, in a film from the creator of 88 Minutes. What a terrible world we live in.