88 Minutes

Minute seven: Oh, right, Pacino's in this movie! Minute 16: And someone wants to kill him for putting a murderer on death row. Minute 21: Wow, he's a jerk! Kind of rooting for the bad guys now. Minute 29: Wait, you want me to believe what? Minute 31: How much longer, again? Minute 34: Please, let me die.

Review in a Hurry:  Minute seven: Oh, right, Al Pacino's in this movie! Minute 16: And someone wants to kill him for putting a murderer on death row. Minute 21: Wow, he's a jerk! Kind of rooting for the bad guys now. Minute 29: Wait, you want me to believe what? Minute 31: How much longer, again? Minute 34: Please, let me die.

The Bigger Picture:  This movie is more or less in real time and absolutely phony everything else. Pacino sleepwalks through this unthrilling thriller about an FBI profiler who's getting awfully specific death threats on the day his most famous serial-killer catch (Neal McDonough) is scheduled for execution. The threats aren't very helpful, though, so there's a series of clues that—oh, wait, they don't lead anywhere, either.

88 Minutes (false advertising, this thing will cost you at least an hour-forty plus trailers, and that's if you skip the credits) is positively infested with what you might call red herrings; though, since nobody bothers to investigate most of them, they're just plain dead fish, which might be why the whole thing reeks. Great heaps of the film involve Pacino walking while shouting random names into a cell phone, which at least does put to rest the question of whether an actor of his caliber can remain engrossing while he's reading the phone book: No, he can't..

What's left is lackluster boilerplate B-movie stuff—ludicrously orchestrated frame-ups, laughable back story, clumsy attempts at poignant interludes and unintentional comedy. "I went to great lengths to set this up," says the villain, apparently sans irony despite the actual length of rope in said villain's hands at the time. Gee, thanks, but you needn't have troubled yourself. 88 Minutes is never going to have its 15.

The 180—a Second Opinion:  Well, this is a master class in how not to organize a whodunit. And if you attended with a stopwatch and some graph paper, you might be able to make an interesting chart detailing how long it took before the individual actors clearly stopped caring.