88 Minutes of Your Life: Gone
by Ian Nightangale
World Contributer
I was planning on writing a more serious article for this issue, but after hearing interest in this film scattered around the campus, I decided to issue a warning—a public service announcement, if you will.
Do not see this movie. This movie has no redeeming qualities. Every painful second reminds you that your eight-dollar ticket could have been better spent on a blunt object with which you could repeatedly strike your head. With every passing frame you wonder just how much money it cost to hire Al Pacino for this terrible film.
Within the first several minutes I was sure that this movie was going to be awful. Al Pacino's character, Dr. Gramm, wakes up to find a nude woman displaying her flexibility at his bedside. From then on the movie proceeds to commit every crime in the book, from a mediocre and incredibly predictable plot to a supporting cast so mundane and drab that you could have sworn they were picked off the street if you hadn't recognized the annoying secondary love interest from Two Weeks Notice.
Oftentimes when one sees poorly written movies, he or she can at least enjoy the special effects and visuals. There was no such luck in 88 Minutes, which had probably the worst direction and cinematography of anything I've seen put on the silver screen. The camera movements were so lazy and predictable that any attempts at suspense were foiled by the inadequacies of the director.
The footage that embodies everything wrong with this film occurs during a flashback of Dr. Gramm's. He is supposedly recalling his sister, and we are shown a terrible shot of a girl running on a beach in slow motion with a kite. However, the producers thought that aside from slightly enhancing the color, there was no need to have any visual effects to represent a change in time. What is far more surprising is that she shouts "Daddy, Daddy," when she is supposed to be his sister. Believe me, this one shot is so terrible that when it was played during the "climax" of the film I burst out laughing.
To sum it all up, don't see this movie. Don't see it to be ironic, don't see it because it has Al Pacino, and don't see it just to see how bad it is; just don't see it. The film is yet another tragic example of Hollywood thinking that good actor + bad script + bad cast + bad filmmaking + good publicity makes a good movie. It doesn't. And quite frankly, my biggest wish was that this movie would have mirrored its title, because I would have had only 88 minutes of torture as opposed to the agonizing 108 I spent in that theatre.