When did cell phones become more important to cop movies than guns?
I mean really, would Dirty Harry have gotten anywhere if he’d had to check his Blackberry every five minutes? A movie like “88 Minutes” would be impossible without the omnipresent mobile phone, used here by a mad killer to bark warnings at Seattle forensic psychiatrist Al Pacino.
Pacino’s testimony put a murderer (Neal McDonough) on death row. Years later, on execution day, people start dying again. And then there are the phone calls telling Pacino he’s got exactly 88 minutes to live.
At that point, he must scurry around Seattle, sifting through the sorriest bunch of red herrings you ever smelled. Except of course this isn’t really Seattle, it’s Vancouver, B.C., a more economical place to film than its U.S. counterpart.
That aside, “88 Minutes” indulges in a shameless array of possible suspects, including the hero himself. Half of Pacino’s med school class, for instance, including students played by Alicia Witt, Leelee Sobieski and Benjamin McKenzie. And there’s a university honcho (Deborah Kara Unger), other police (Amy Brenneman, William Forsythe), and a few weirdly emphasized passersby who raise suspicions and then are never heard from again.
The good news is that director Jon Avnet keeps all of this moving at such an absurdly pumped-up rate that you don’t have too much time to notice the glitches.
Meanwhile, Pacino, who seems to be getting shorter even as his hair gets taller, scuttles through the picture in memorably zonked-out fashion — even for Pacino. He actually has to execute a few action-movie jumps and runs, in the fashion of late-era Harrison Ford movies.
Still, Pacino can summon up the old “And Justice for All” emotionalism, which serves him well in this context. But by the time screenwriter Gary Scott Thompson pulls out a decades-old crime from Pacino’s past, you know the movie is willing to pile on the nonsense just for effect.
By the way, the serial murderer has been dubbed the “Seattle Slayer,” an unfortunate nickname that the police have to keep saying. He is actually played by the “Vancouver Villain,” who works much cheaper.
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