88 Minutes.

"Filmed on the cheap almost two and a half years ago in Vancouver and only arriving in North American theatres now, 88 Minutes will likely be remembered only as one of the least distinguished starring vehicles in Al Pacino's long and admirable film career," writes Paul Matwychuk.

"88 Minutes can't even live up to its title. With 19 - count 'em, 19 - producers, including director Jon Avnet, ensuring that every aspect of the film, from the script to the star's haircut, is ludicrous in the extreme, the picture easily snatches from Revolution the prize as Al Pacino's career worst," writes Variety's Todd McCarthy.

Updated through 4/18.

Chris Cagle finds McCarthy's review "entertaining enough for those who like snark (I sometimes do), but for me it raised a larger question: when (and why) did trade press reviews start sounding like their counterparts in the popular press?"

"With its lumbering efforts at black humor and phony pretense to moral complexity, 88 Minutes is an ugly specimen on just about every front," writes Ella Taylor in the Voice. "There is one way, however, in which, all unawares, the movie works like a charm - as a twisted, self-torturing essay on the aging man's fear of and desire for the young female body. We may have to sit through worse films to come this year, but with any luck, there'll be none as guilelessly, idiotically misogynist as this one."

"88 Minutes is a cheesy, star-driven thriller, and the wrong Al Pacino shows up to drive it: instead of the devilish ham from The Recruit or The Devil's Advocate, we mostly get the weary old man from Insomnia and People I Know, severed from the ambitions and complexities of those films." Jesse Hassenger in the L Magazine.

Online listening tip. The IFC's Matt Singer and Alison Willmore discuss "Movies in Real Time."

Update, 4/17: "Let 2008's 10 Worst List begin," suggests Armond White in the New York Press.

Updates, 4/18: "Although it's often laugh-out-loud laughably bad, 88 Minutes is mostly just a slog," writes Manohla Dargis in the New York Times. "Misogyny aside, the attention shown to the display of dead bodies in 88 Minutes offers continued evidence that cinema's fascination with human locomotion during the art's first 50 years - evident in early motion studies, in the gymnastics of the silent-movie clowns and in musicals - seems to have been supplanted in the last 50 by a fascination with rigor mortis. The touchstone for this shift is probably Hitchcock's masterpiece Psycho, in which the camera is more vibrantly alive than any of the characters, including that dead blonde in the shower. She makes such a beautiful corpse it's no wonder that we keep asking for more."

"'It's not absurd!' Pacino barks at FBI agent William Forsythe after explaining the whole dead-hooker-semen-pumping theory," sighs Keith Phipps at the AV Club. "Actually, it's pretty much the definition of absurd."

Salon's Stephanie Zacharek: "He has 88 minutes to live. But trust me, it feels more like around 236."

"[W]e watch as one of cinema's greatest talents runs to and fro with absolutely nothing to do," sighs S James Snyder in the New York Sun. "I'd rather watch 88 uninterrupted minutes of Mr Pacino running on a treadmill."

"Couldn't a cleverer filmmaker have set the movie in real time, and then used flashbacks to do all that boring preliminary stuff?" asks Jeffrey M Anderson at Cinematical. "Wouldn't the film have been much better if it just started with a bang, with that phone call?"

"Rather than being memorably disastrous, 88 Minutes is merely crappy," writes Alonso Duralde for MSNBC.

Posted by dwhudson at April 16, 2008 8:10 AM