film reviews:
88 Minutes
Directed by John Avnet
Script by Gary Scott Thompson
April 27, 2008
I went to this film because I got my movie times mixed up and the intelligent and sophisticated film I was planning to see had already started. And it was raining and I had spent good money on parking - the non-refundable kind. So, like I said, it was raining and I was confronted with great dilemma: to Pacino or not to Pacino. And like the sucker I am, I plonked down the $10.00 and went in.
I was moderately prepared for a bad film but not for this.
It's actually really hard to believe how bad this film is and I was, literally, sitting open mouthed in amazement for much of the film. That is, when I wasn't laughing.
The opening, however, is not at all funny and involves the unpleasant capture-and-torture of two beautiful young Asian-American sisters. The violence depicted is reasonably graphic and sexual in a crude and exploitative manner and is filmed with such incompetence that it feels much worse than it should. You really feel for a moment that you are watching a low budget exploitation flick - the kind that makes sexual violence somehow more repulsive because you know that the scene was devised around the violence and the nudity and not as a consequence of the plot.
I momentarily had hope, as early in the scene as the stalker moves omniously towards his victim, she turns, sees the danger, gasps and the camera cuts to black. And I thought how delightfully subtle, expecting to leave the scene with all the horrible imaginings inherent there and to move forward into the plot. Not so. The next scene is a close up of rope and scalpel and the torture begins in earnest.
Like some of you here, I have spent those sleepless nights trying desperately to squelch down that vile-ish instinct for revenge. And I have wondered if this pain will ever abate. And I've learned that time does not heal the wound, it will though, in its most merciful way, blunt the edge ever so slightly. Dr. Jack Gramm
Just so you know, Pacino plays Jack Gramm, a star forensic psychiatrist and professor responsible for sending a man whom he believes to be a serial killer, John Forster (Neal McDonough, of the ice blue serial killer eyes), to the electric chair. On the day the murderer is scheduled to die, Gramm receives a mysterious call on his cellphone: He has 88 minutes to live and thus begins the longest and most painful 88 minutes in history and some of the worst Hollywood has to offer. There is a courtroom scene early in the film that is so silly that I was completely dumbfounded and we certainly begin to see where some of the blame for this disaster can be apportioned - the scriptwriter, though is is a bit of a stretch to call this a script, its more like a assemblage of bits that somehow holds together. The fact that this made it past various desks and readings is quite amazing - or that it got the Green Light at all! The only good thing is that there are some howlingly funny lines, stunning in their stupidity. And the best part is we get to actually watch actors try to make these scenes work, which I found perversely enjoyable but maybe I don't get out enough.
This is truly an awful and inept bit of scriptwriting.
As is the direction which has little to recommend it either and if I was pressed to find a way to describe it, the word would be lumbering. Or plodding. Or bad. Sometimes a talented director will get his hands on a crap script like this and make it entertaining. Gregory Hoblit took the fairly preposterous (and sadistic) Untraceable and made it at least watchable, if not quite enjoyable. This Avnet guy is a hack of the lowest order, with all the skills of a porn merchant. Following from that is the editing which is so bad in places that I began to suspect that the editor was deliberately cutting scenes poorly to get revenge on Avnet or someone else involved in this abomination who he was angry with.
The only thing that can sort of recommend this film is Pacino who does some very good and reasonably controlled work. In fact, it is amazing how he is able to deliver inane line after line as if it were the finest dialogue imaginable and even respond to the other characters in an appropriate and serious manner. And he looks great, rumpled and craggy and his energy really carries this film - much more than it deserves.
Finally, this is one movie where you could have got away with leaving your cell phone on as there is not a scene in the film where a cell phone doesn't go off at least once - and sometimes more, usually interrupting one lousy line so someone can deliver another. And another. And the ending: well, by this point I was so brutalized by the unrelenting stupidity that I found myself laughing at the spectacle of Deborah Kara Unger hanging upside down, bleeding and wimpering. Not that such a thing is particularly funny, mind you, just that the film leaves no other response. Such is the effect of such vast uncaring incompetence.
The only reason to see this film is that it is really hard to believe that it is a bad as it is; however, that two hours of your life you won't get back so do something else with your time, like be nice to someone.
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is up; next I will be writing a review of the decidedly non-criminal The Ruins.
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I am in the process of reading local authors Kay Stewart and Chris Bullock's A Deadly Little List And Stan Evans' Seaweed on the Street.
