88 Minutes

Al Pacino has 88 Minutes -- you and I have 105 -- to figure out who's trying to kill him, and why. We'll need every one of them.

Tedious and convoluted, 88 Minutes feels as if it plays much longer.

88 Minutes is a textbook Hollywood thriller, in the worst possible sense of the phrase. If that's your thing, more power to you, but there's got to be better ways to spend your time.

88 Minutes is a sleazy cheeseball movie that depends on a ticking time bomb for what little tension it evokes.

A cheap thriller with an expensive star, 88 Minutes is fast, sleazy and serviceable -- in other words, totally watchable -- and has one point in its favor: It never tries to pretend it's a class act.

There are few movie pleasures more reliable than the spectacle of watching Al Pacino become unhinged.

88 Minutes should be the running time of a smart, swift little thriller. It should not be the answer to the question "How long do you think before I forget this nonsense?"

As far-fetched as the film plays (the speed with which the unseen force manipulates events is preposterous), there’s a comfortable joy in watching Pacino play fast and loose.

88 Minutes is what happens when great actors make terrible movies.

At 68, Pacino still has the chops to give a scene a moment of raw power. But it's clear he could care less about this story, his performance has no conviction, and he's mostly emitting sparks of self-parody.

It's a shame to see someone like Pacino again waste his enormous gifts on a piece of junk like 88 Minutes -- a film that should have been released straight to video, if at all.

Narratives, including those presented in boring old black and white, need more than gimmicks to sustain them -- a lesson that the makers of 88 Minutes apparently didn't take the time to learn.

The meandering plot is moved along by unintentionally humorous dialogue -- a parade of obvious statements and clumsy exposition.

Pacino has been a key ingredient in some of the best films of the 20th century. His 21st century audiences deserve better than to suffer through 88 Minutes of sheer idiocy.

88 Minutes proves itself to be a maddeningly mediocre, ineptly manipulative "real-time" thriller. (A real-time thriller that's almost 20 minutes longer than its title suggests.)

Suspense is totally abandoned here, as the fast-paced flick continually moves forward to mask lackluster dialogue and any hint of cleverness.

Since no thriller seems complete these days without gratuitous torture porn, we're treated to some repellent scenes of violent crime, practiced upon nubile young victims in lingerie.

The film piles gimmicks on top of fake-outs on top of red herrings.

The only way to survive 88 Minutes, the new Al Pacino serial-killer thriller, aside from skipping it altogether, might be to use it as a drinking game.

Director Jon Avnet hacks his way through a script that barely hangs together.

This could be the single dumbest movie to be released yet this year, which is no small feat.

88 Minutes? How about five? That’s about all you’re going to be able to stomach watching this hackneyed mess.

It’s not often you encounter a feature film that contains not even one believable minute.

For those who are wondering, 88 Minutes isn't. It misses the mark by about 20 minutes, giving the film a slightly bloated aspect and leaving viewers feeling a bit cheated.

This is easily one of the silliest, most preposterous thrillers ever made, and the only reason it didn't go straight to video has to be that it stars Pacino.

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.

A film that is topsy-turvy and dead on arrival.

Did Pacino actually read this dreadful script, credited to Gary Scott Thompson, the same wordsmith who gave us Hollow Man and The Fast and the Furious? To suggest that chimps might have written it is an insult to chimps.

Gary Scott Thompson and Jon Avnet's twisty tale of a forensic psychiatrist given 88 Minutes to live by a shadowy sociopath might have made an entertainingly direct-to-DVD B-movie thriller with the courage of its sleazy convictions.s

This may be the most preposterous movie of the year. It is certainly the most ridiculous movie starring an Oscar-winning actor.

Working on his first feature since Red Corner in 1997, director Jon Avnet conspires with cast and crew to exploit every verbal, visual, structural and aural cliché available to him.

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.

Inanity and incompetence form an imposing tag team in 88 Minutes, the current favorite for 2008's dumbest movie.

It will actually take a lot less than 88 Minutes for most audience members to figure out whodunit, thanks to some clunky execution that effectively tips the culprit's identity within the first half-hour.

It easily ranks among the worst movies Al Pacino has made, though it doesn't come with the pleasures some of his earlier dogs afford.

88 Minutes is a formula thriller, and as far as we can make out, that formula is 8 minutes of good stuff and 80 minutes of useless crap filler.

This disposable thriller just might be the worst film of Al Pacino’s career.

Pacino is never a bore to watch. We keep waiting for that moment when he winks at the camera or lets fly a "Hoo-hah!" to tell us he's in on the joke. Maybe he wasn't.

How exactly does Pacino's hairpiece manage to hover an inch off his scalp for the entire film?

At every possible turn 88 Minutes wears its stupidity with pride, like a kid who's super-excited about stuffing pencils up his nose.

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

If you attended with a stopwatch and some graph paper, you might be able to make an interesting chart detailing how long it took before the individual actors clearly stopped caring.

This slimy, slug-minded mystery thriller starts out dead on arrival and then, like three-day-old fish, gets really bad really fast.

Movies this stupid usually have names like Pauly Shore or Larry the Cable Guy attached, not Al Pacino.

If 88 Minutes actually was 88 minutes long, it would be 20 minutes less to endure.