Watch 88 Online free The execrable “88 Minutes” has many of the main ingredients for a camp lollapalooza, notably one of those unfortunate Al Pacino star turns that make you wonder if a career intervention is even possible at this stage. Certainly his startling appearance — a dusky orange tan that suggests a charbroiled George Hamilton and an elevated pouf of hair that appears to have been engineered to put Mr. Pacino within vertical range of his female co-stars — suggests a level of vanity that might make an intervention difficult. Vanity is a star’s prerogative, but it can be the portal to inescapable self-parody, as the late-period Joan Crawford attests.
Although it’s often laugh-out-loud laughably bad, “88 Minutes” is mostly just a slog. The subject doesn’t help: it opens with an intricately choreographed murder that finds a young Seattle woman trussed up like a hog for slaughter. Cut to the present. The murderer has been caught, and the man who helped put the villain on death row is Dr. Jack Gramm (Mr. Pacino),
a forensic psychiatrist and professor with young Amazon students (Alicia Witt and Leelee Sobieski) and a sympathetic foil with a badge (William Forsythe). Dr. Jack fields lots of calls from his assistant (Amy Brenneman), but one day he receives a ring-a-ding from someone who says that he has 88 minutes to live ... then 82 minutes ... and so on.
Movies that make a ticking clock part of the story run the risk that viewers may start checking their watches, and so it is with this one, which seems to slow down the longer it goes, largely because it runs an interminable 105 minutes and not a tantalizing 88. During what’s meant to be a short time, the plot complications amass, as do incoherent camera setups and yet more elaborately trussed-up female bodies. A few outré touches help pass the tick-tock, tick-tock, including the dissonant casting of the spectral Deborah Kara Unger as a college dean and the production design for Dr. Jack’s digs, a Sharper Image bachelor pad with a wine collection and a Walther pistol, a brand favored by James Bond.
Outside of Ms. Unger, who delivers one of her singular and eminently watchable narcoleptic turns (and seems to have actually done a little of her own stunt work), the performances are risible. The usually appealing Ms. Witt and Ms. Sobieski fare less well than Ms. Unger does, largely because one is forced to vamp Dr. Jack while the other assumes a naughtier role, and in leather pants, no less. Mr. Pacino, who spends much of his screen time talking and occasionally shouting into a cellphone, barely seems to register that he’s sharing the screen with any other actors, perhaps because in a very fundamental way he isn’t. There’s nothing to be said about Jon Avnet’s direction except that he sure does like aerial shots.
In fact, there’s nothing at all left to be said about this idiotic flick. But here’s a thought: 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.
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