"88 Minutes" falls short with tired thriller formula

One of the chief problems of "88 Minutes"-and to be sure, there are hundreds-lies in the fact that the movie is, well, 88 minutes long.

This makes it both too short to develop the 83rd to 97th plot twists and too long to keep the viewers interest for the last half hour.

Al Pacino plays Dr. Jack Gramm, a forensic something-or-other who is responsible for putting Jon Forster (Neil McDonough) behind bars for hanging women upside down while slicing them apart and raping them. (The movie is actually 108 minutes to allow for an endless opening sequence, which shows this graphic bind, torture and kill.)

Gramm receives mysterious cell phone calls warning him that he only has an hour and twenty-two minutes to live. The calls feature a deep voice uttering the most horrifying nursery rhyme ever: "Tick, tock, Doc. You have [fill in the blank] minutes to live."

These occasional calls and messages are welcome to viewers, who are able to use them as a guide to when this godforsaken train wreck of a film will end, allowing them to get on with their lives.

Doc Gramm follows clues to find out who this aspiring Dr. Seuss is, and everyone's a suspect. No, really. Everyone. You can tell, because they all walk by Gramm in slow motion with a close-up on their faces, each with an "I'm-gonna-kill-you" stare.

All the information that Gramm has to go on is that the "Seattle Slayer," as the killer is called, is wearing leather. (Seattle must be a pretty kinky town, because everyone seems to either be wearing a full bikers outfit or dressed like Rob Halford of Judas Priest.)

"88 Minutes" is just a clumsy effort at moviemaking. The dialogue ranges from unspeakably horrible to incredibly forced. Character development is squeezed into the limited timeframe as an afterthought to exploding cars, as characters talk about their relationship troubles and childhood traumas.

The plot twists are this hurried too. ("Darn, I broke my cell phone." "Here, use mine.") Or: ("He's not really your ex-boyfriend, is he?" "No, he's my ex-husband.")

The writing, to put it mildly, is horrendous. From an early courtroom scene that sounds like it was written by a seventh grader who just discovered Shakespearean prose, you can tell it's going to be a rough ride.

At least Pacino manages to lighten up the scene by cracking a few charismatic jokes to make the jury chuckle. At the trial of a serial rapist and murderer.

When Pacino addresses his college class, he playfully banters with students who chuckle at his jokes and call out smart aleck comments.

(Have screenwriters ever been to college? Students never laugh at professors' jokes, yet this stock scene still makes its way into any on-screen lecture hall.)

If the writing is horrendous, the acting is criminal.

Pacino has gotten a pass for a long time (look at his credits: has he done anything worthwhile in the past decade aside from "Angels in America?"). He used to be able to play a range of emotions from serene to emotionally exploding. Now, he just yells. A lot. And vociferously.

Insanely Angry Pacino is the new Standard Pacino.

The movie is terrible, but usually not laughably so. The rare exception is Leelee Sobieski. She has hit the trifecta of terrible films over the last three years with "88 Minutes," "In the Name of the King: A Dungeon Siege Tale" and "Wicker Man." Those three films have an average score of 2.7/10 on metacritic.com and 9 percent on rottentomatoes.com.

Sobieski is atrociously bad. She speaks in flowery and forced tones that make her sound like an understudy for a community theater production.

This isn't the kind of horrible movie you can laugh your way through. Even keeping your eyes open to the end is a chore. The action mostly consists of Pacino phoning his secretary asking for various police reports and psychiatric files.

And when it finally does end, you are confronted with an undeniable fact: you just wasted 88-plus minutes of your life watching a washed-up, once-great actor phone in a performance-quite literally.