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88 Minutes (2007)

Rate: 5
Viewed: 2/25

88M
2/25: 88 Minutes is a misleading title.

I prefer short movies, but this one runs for 110 minutes. Worse is the filmmakers packing so much activity in this said amount of time when they actually take hours to complete. It's an important point because the following major plot hole has been created down the road.

How did Lydia Doherty manage to go over to the apartment where Dr. Gramm and his teaching assistant were last at and snatch the female before returning to the university in the span of fifteen minutes or so? If Lydia stayed at the campus the whole time after she was left by Dr. Gramm in the security office, that would be fine by me, but she literally had to leave there and locate the teaching assistant, do the work to overpower her in front of the FBI and others, drag her body to the car, and drive back to the campus, so she could set up the elaborate "See...I'm the one who did it!" finale with Dr. Gramm.

Another way of viewing 88 Minutes is it's Al Pacino who's surrounded by bad actresses for 110 minutes. While his eyes are paycheck-focused, somebody should've fixed his ridiculous hairdo out of fear of it being blown off by the wind. With the exception of William Forsythe, it's obvious that Al Pacino is far ahead of everybody, who's like forty years his junior, in terms of acting ability, making me wonder what he's doing in this rubbish picture.

Then, we have the mother of them all: Leelee Sobieski. It wouldn't be long before she thankfully retired from acting. She always has the same emotion that comes off flat every single time. I knew it had to be her doing all the nefarious work for a couple of reasons. She's a "big" star which negates the idea of a cameo appearance. Second, when her character's face was bleeding after the "attack," the first thought that popped in my head was: please wipe off the blood first to see if her wounds were for real. A couple of times, I did entertain thoughts of the class having been involved the whole time (Murder on the Orient Express) and Al Pacino as the killer after all (Cruising), but I dismissed them for making no sense.

It's interesting the story takes place in Seattle because the Pacific Northwest region was, once upon a time, a hotbed of serial killers. That's because drug addicts, hookers, and runaways tended to flock there which set them up as easy targets to disappear and nobody cared. There's also the woods that made dumping their bodies easy without leaving much of evidence due to heavy rain.

All in all, 88 Minutes is really a '6' film, but the lack of logic keeps dragging it down.