'88 Minutes,' the Countdown to a Bomb

Whatever happened to Al Pacino? In "The Godfather," at the age of 32, he dominated with a glare, a stare and a buttoned lip. His Michael was the fulcrum upon which the movie (and the one that followed) pivoted and he made you feel so much more by showing so much less. It was a coiled, controlled performance, one of the greatest in American movies.

But a few years ago (I date it to 1995's "Heat") he seemed to change his theory: He got big, and the pictures got small. Now he's a blowhard, a scenery-guzzler, one of those loud and showy guys who seems to act more with his hair (it looks like a nuclear explosion in a feather factory) than his eyes. His lip is so far from buttoned it's a joke: Loose lips sink movies.

In "88 Minutes" he plays some kind of playboy-forensic psychologist-professor who, on the eve of the execution of the man whom he most famously testified against, receives a phone message that he has 88 minutes to live. Thus, in real time, he must find the putative killer and prevent his own death, even as, in the Seattle that is the movie's setting, bodies are being uncovered in crime scenes that so replicate those of the man Pacino testified against it suggests that he may have helped convict the wrong man.

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. I loved an overwrought scene where Pacino races through a parking garage waving his badge and screaming "Halt, I'm a forensic psychologist for the FBI!" And if they don't halt, what's he going to do? Psychoanalyze them?

But the implausibility of it is only one problem, and the over-reliance on cellphone-delivered plot developments every six minutes is but one more irritation. There are so many others. The movie seems to have that Woody Allen old-guy's-vanity thing going on: The old lion is surrounded by beautiful younger lionesses, his hair a suspiciously dark color, his wardrobe too hip for anyone over 22, his car too quick for his aging reflexes. Then there's the structural deficiency of having the villain locked up on death row. That fellow, played by Aryan specimen No. 1 Neal McDonough, can't get around and do things, and must therefore exert his will by proxy. So the plot is left to turn on one of those bizarre human permutations where a lover of the condemned man does his bidding and since the bidding is so energetic (the conceit of the killer is that he suspends his victims from elaborate pulley systems), you're left to wonder if one person could do it all, much less that fast?

And the only way the filmmakers can keep McDonough in the movie is to make him accessible to TV interviewers (on the day of his execution) which leads to a preposterous encounter where the shrink and the killer debate each other on national TV.

I understand that the genre licenses directors and writers to stretch a truth for dramatic effect but in this case, the truth hasn't been stretched, it's been drawn-and-quartered.

88 Minutes (107 minutes, at area theaters) is rated R for extreme violence directed at women, brief nudity and language.