I was somewhat excited about this one, because I liked Nick of Time so much. Nick of Time takes place in real time, that is, everything on the screen is what’s happening, like 24, from the beginning of the event until its resolution. It is really an exciting and clever concept when it’s well done.
However, 88 Minutes, despite the teasing title, is not in real time, number one. What a disappointment. However, from the moment Al Pacino is told he will die in 88 minutes, it is 88 minutes to the closing credits.
But there is none of the satisfaction of Nick of Time because 88 Minutes doesn’t stick to its own schedule. It’s not such a minor detail, not with that title.
No fair!
There is very little about this film that works – it’s an extraordinary failure, flawed from the get go.
The film’s problems just get more and more problematic as the clock ticks.
First, it’s exploitation city, naked dead girls in tortuous sexual positions, leering lesbians, crazy bisexuals, crazy bisexuals in leather, a half dressed assistant and the standard targeted profiler.
Pacino is a college professor and serial killer profiler with the Feds whose testimony put some bad dude away forever. He has a small but devoted group of students who have been studying his case. He encourages them to challenge him, but recently, some have been more aggressive than usual calling his judgement into question.
The targeted serial killer profiler is an old chestnut, pinned on the serial killer mania of ten years ago. It’ a very tired and listless addition to the subgenre - I don’t want to diss anyone’s creativity but the script might have kicked around for while before being made; it’s a few beats behind current public taste. The serial killer /profiler period is most irretrievably dead and buried.
The script is weak with abundant laughs when there is nothing funny on the screen. Outrageously inappropriate things are said and done that defy good sense. A good dose of irony would have helped enormously and a little less earnest daffiness.
You can actually see the actors cringe – fine talents like Alicia Witt who does her best with the weirdly off kilter script presumably for the chance to work with Pacino. Fine actors Amy Brenneman, Leelee Sobieski, TV’s Ben Mackenzie, Neal McDonough and Deborah Kara Unger – who dangles by her foot for most of her screen time – are lost in this sucking cinematic wound.
Pacino hits a career low not because he is awful but because he took on the project at all. Could it have read well? It’s a long way from the searing films he’s delivered – a long way. And yet, God bless him, he puts a lot of effort and good sportsmanship into it.
Okay – so here it is. The man his testimony put away is scheduled to die at midnight. That day, the professor gets a call from a mystery voice, someone who knows that the number 88 is meaningful to him, and that it’s connected to something horrible in his past.
He casts his eye about looking for the perpetrator of the threatening call. Could it be a student, the killer about to be executed, that stranger hanging around wearing head to toe leather?
With 88 minutes to live he sets off on this mystery sojourn, even as we already suspect who the dastardly one is.
Please refer to paragraph three – exploitation – and fill in the rest. You know what the story is, how things unfold and who wins. In the end, 88 Minutes cheated me out of 109 minutes of solid Bubble Breaker time.
I will now keep my fingers crossed and hope that this fine stable of actors recovers from this experience and carries onward and upward.
Now where’s that VHS of Nick of Time?
Written by Gary Scott Thompson
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