Review of 88 Minutes (2007) by Lesley B — 03 Mar 2009

The Panic In Needle Park, 1971. The Godfather trilogy, spanning almost twenty years. Serpico, 1973. Dog Day Afternoon, 1975. â?¦And Justice For All, 1979. Glengarry Glen Ross, 1990. Scent of a Woman, 1992. Heat, 1995. Angels In America, 2003. Hell, Scarface. Shoot, Sea of Love. Um, I'm sorry, 88 Minutes? Of all the scripts that no doubt fly every which way all day every day across Al Pacino's desk, mailbox, e-mail and fax machines, he zeroed in on 88 Minutes? There wasn't something better than this?

This film saddens me, because aside from being an inexplicable move on Pacino's part, it seems to reflect what people think all Pacino is good for now. Is that all he is to people now? A too-cool-for-school, raspy-voiced walk-on who does at least one required quick temper scene and at least one required monologue? There is a manner of trickle-down effect here. The young-male target audience, having exalted the contemporary classic gangster films to a point where the highly sophisticated, tremendously talented leading men who star in them are slowly relegated to roles that take on vaguely familiar criteria for a cash-in action picture aimed at that very target audience. Thus, they are wasted. We can only wonder what script to which Pacino could have agreed had he not settled on what must have only been a month or so of his life phoning in for this empty shell of a synthetically realized psychological thriller.

I would gamble a lot on the assumption that Pacino himself or any fan of this movie has, if any of them have read this assessment of mine, said something to the effect of, "Yeah yeah yeah," at about the time when I mentioned Dog Day Afternoon. But what I have yet to understand is why someone of Pacino's stature and capability, being one of my most favorite actors of all time, would decide to follow through with a project like this. Because he wanted a break, or because it is easy since it is so below him? Because in all honesty, regardless of all of the tremendous performances with which I opened this note, he does not even find a tone anywhere close to that of a psychologist. He plays the dark, inept, emotionally scarred protagonist, patly named Jack Gramm, like a cop who has seen too much, and even though Pacino has a small handful of fleeting trademark moments of rising blood pressure, those moments are incongruous to the story. In spite of Gramm's traumatic past, he is a leading forensic psychologist. I can imagine a forensic psychologist with tender, wounded feelings, perhaps dejected or worryingly edgy, if it intuits to us an irrevocable secret, but I truly think that Pacino forgot he was playing one. I think he, just as did everyone else involved, reclined so far that they slipped into the cozy stream of routine.

I am not going to hammer out the story, because though it certainly is cliché, that does not matter. A good writer and a good director could have made it entertaining, and even a little intelligent. What matters is that it is told with clichés while the writer and director, both plagued by melancholia, are asleep at their posts, almost enamored of indifference, reluctant to make constructive changes when opportunity knocks. By the time the film unravels itself to its twist, it is admittedly unpredictable, but only because of how silly, contrived and frankly anti-climatic it all turns out to be. And throughout, we hate our villain with a passionate vengeance not because he is so capably sadistic or cruel but really because his overdone squinty-eyed looks of being a predatory mastermind and his recurrent whisper of "Tick tock, doc," are nerve-grating and exasperating.

I am not knocking Alicia Witt, Leelee Sobieski, Amy Brennemann, Leah Cairns or Victoria Tennant for being insatiably hot women, or even that the film seems to evoke more of an effort to accentuate this by means of their clothes and the position of the camera than it does in the case of anything else. What I would like to point out is that I sincerely doubt female viewers identify very much with the characters of any of them, because they are written and directed from such a male horndog point of view. Must we really buy for longer than a second that every single one of these women has an undercurrent of latent attraction to Pacino's character? Even Brennemann's lesbian character, a relationship with whom is only obstructed by her orientation? And as much as I would love it my male horndog self if every woman in the world had all the ideal curves and wore just the right clothes to telegraph them, it just is not how things are, and as petty as all this sounds, I would bet that this film's cast would have been many times more involved in the film they were making had they been given characters who were real to some extent, with something real to say or real to do or even real to think, rather than pop-up boards puppeteered by the agonizingly willful conformist of what is supposed to be an original screenplay.