88 Minutes: Critic Reviews

It takes eight minutes, tops, to know that even by the conventionally lax standards of watch-and-toss serial-killer movies, 88 Minutes is a stinker, the more so for the thespian excesses of the accomplished cast.

Although it's often laugh-out-loud laughably bad, 88 Minutes is mostly just a slog.

An inane thriller whose major fear factor hinges on a menacing phone call, the film also relies on a silly phrase intended to fill the viewer with unspeakable terror: 'Tick tock, Doc.'

Not merely Pacino's over-mannered, near-histrionic performance, but the movie itself could be characterized as busy, busy, busy. It's so full of plot twists and revelations and exploding sports cars that its very perkiness comes to seem comic.

The illogical script by Gary Scott Thompson is desperate to keep us guessing but clueless as to how. Every tin of red herring in the store gets ripped open.

This slimy, slug-minded mystery thriller starts out dead on arrival and then, like three-day-old fish, gets really bad really fast. And it stays bad, ensnaring its star and every other cast member in its wretched net.

What a bore. I guessed the identity of the killer from the character's second appearance, and I'm not that smart.

The galumphing serial-killer picture 88 Minutes is dumb enough to be straight out of the parodies in Forgetting Sarah Marshall.

Nothing would give me keener pleasure than to reveal the identity of the killer, but a day after seeing the film I have genuinely forgotten.

The preposterous "88 Minutes" is a serial killer movie starring Al Pacino's festival of hair.

A maddeningly mediocre, ineptly manipulative 'real-time' thriller. (A real-time thriller that's almost 20 minutes longer than its title suggests.)

Preposterous in design, abysmal in execution and laugh-out-loud funny when it's straining for drama, the film doesn't even honor the lean-and-mean promise of its title.

Throughout which, you ask: Why is Al Pacino in this movie?... The better question: Why are you in the theater?

88 Minutes will add a little more luster to a career that has not been adequately appreciated perhaps because of the suspiciously seductive power of a little man with an outsize talent.

The picture easily snatches from Revolution the prize as Al Pacino's career worst.

88 Minutes holds you in a state of acute suspense, keeping you wondering until the very last minute whether this is the worst Al Pacino movie ever made.

Markedly un-thrilling.

This movie is Battlefield Earth bad. It's 10,000 B.C. bad. It's bad with a side of fries and a cherry cola.

If you like your women half-naked, strung upside-down from pulleys, and sliced like deli meat, this is the movie for you. Whether the victims are more tortured than the plot is a serious question.

This new serial-killer thriller is such a preposterous mess it's a wonder it ever made it to the theatre.

Avnet lays all this stuff out before us with a straight face -- the picture is humorless and witless.

It's always a shock when a movie turns out to be this bad.

Pacino and company mark time in this preposterous copycat killer thriller.

A stronger word than preposterous is needed to describe the, well, preposterous lengths director Jon Avnet and company go to engorge this movie with idiotic action, incomprehensible twists and loads of other nonsense.

Try as he might to 'hoo-ha' some life into this stupendously stupid thriller, Al Pacino can't disguise the desperation of this CSI wanna-be.