|
|
|
Last Updated: May 6th, 2008 - 11:40:23 |
If you remain an Al Pacino fan despite his many film bombs, even you may find yourself shaking your head in confusion during moments of his new release, “88 Minutes.”
Intended to be a taut murder mystery, police drama and psychological thriller, “88 Minutes” winds up feeling instead like a made-for-TV movie with gore and sadomasochism thrown in for zest.
The story is that Dr. Jack Gramm (Pacino) is a nationally renown expert on serial killers, who has even interviewed the notorious Ted Bundy and John Wayne Gacy. In Seattle, where he teaches at a university, he provides expert testimony that leads to the conviction of a man known as the Seattle Slayer, who is responsible for a series of bizarre rape-murder cases where the slashed victims are tied with rope and left dangling from the ceiling. (This killer is not only nasty, he must travel with a stud finder and power tools!)
Nine years after the conviction, however, a series of copycat cases raises doubts about the guilt of the man, Jon Forster, who is making a final appeal before his execution. At the same time, Gramm receives a series of phone calls one day, threatening his life and telling him that he has 88 minutes to live before he will be killed. Gramm is forced to summon what he knows about killers and murders to catch his killer before the killer catches him.
Pacino ably portrays a man who is brave, wounded, eccentric and vulnerable. For much of the film, his hair sits poufed on top of his head in a manner than makes him look like a mad scientist. As we follow him in the role of some killer’s prey, director Jon Avnet and writer Gary Scott Thompson cover all the familiar bases to create tension and suspense: a spooky underground parking lot and stairway, a car that might explode, a stranger with a scraggly beard and leather jacket who follows Gramm in a surreptitious manner —you get the drift.
These various way stations of murder mystery help organize the film, which is also pushed along by the literal tick-tock of the time element. We are with Gramm for all of his 88 minutes and while some of that time is an engaging whodunit, other minutes feel like the filmmakers ran out of ideas and things to say. Too much focus seems to have been spent on directing the young actors, who surround Pacino, to act in a bizarre way, so that they all appear as possible suspects. The result, unfortunately, is that instead of suspense, we get many moments that are wooden or slightly comical when none of us should be laughing.
This somewhat cheesy treatment of much of the film is in stark juxtaposition to its crime scenes and depicted torture of women, giving the overall production a bi-polar feel. The crime scenes tell us that we are watching a serious movie, while the rest of it tells us that we are not.
This review also appeared on Tom Joyner's BlackAmericaWeb.com,/i>
You can order Esther Iverem's critically praised We Gotta Have It: Twenty Years of Seeing Black at the Movies, 1986-2006 (Thunder’s Mouth Press, April 2007)at Amazon.com or purchase at your favorite bookstore. It makes a wonderful gift! Thanks!
Read and search hundreds of reviews on SeeingBlack.com's Movies/TV channel and archive.
Click here to post a comment or your own review.
© Copyright 2006 SeeingBlack.com
Top of Page
|
|
|
|
