Release Date:  April 18, 2008

Rating:  R (for disturbing violent content, brief nudity and language)

Genre:  Thriller

Run Time:  108 min.

Director:  Jon Avnet

Actors:  Al Pacino, Alicia Witt, LeeLee Sobieski, Amy Brenneman, William Forsythe, Deborah Kara Unger, Neal McDonough, Benjamin McKenzie

Is there a bigger nuisance at the movies these days than the beeping, chirping, tuneless noise of a ringing cell phone? Cell phones have replaced chatty audience members as the biggest distraction for the ticket-buying public. In recent years, the cell phone has become a character around which movie plots revolve. Think Cellular and One Missed Call, both of which revolve around cell-phone shenanigans. Do either qualify in anyone’s mind as an example of a successful, satisfying film? No one that I know of, and yet, the evolution of the cell phone from public nuisance to starring role continues.

88 Minutes outdoes its predecessors in the public nuisance department. The grating sound of a ringing phone is heard so many times in 88 Minutes that viewers’ teeth will not only be set on edge—they’ll be ground to gum line. When the pesky cell phone crashes to the floor and shatters toward the end of the film, audience members might feel inclined to cheer. It’s the high point in this overheated thriller.

Al Pacino stars as FBI forensic psychiatrist Dr. Jack Gramm, an expert at presenting evidence in court that implicates murder suspects. His efforts to see one suspected killer, Jon Forster (Neal McDonough), put away for brutal crimes against women prove effective. But years later—on the eve of Forster’s scheduled execution—the convict launches a media offensive against Gramm, charging him with falsifying evidence and lying under oath to ensure Forster’s imprisonment. 

Gramm, also a college professor who teaches forensics, begins receiving menacing messages—calls on his phone, messages on his class overhead projector, letters scrawled in the dirt on his car—telling him how many minutes he has left to live. Eighty-eight minutes. Seventy-two minutes. And so on, and so on.

The tormentor has access to Gramm’s schedule and to certain private information. And he uses a telltale phrase—“tick tock”—said by Forster in the courtroom after his conviction years earlier. So Forster is the obvious suspect, but he’s behind bars. Does that make one of Gramm’s students the prime suspect? What about the shady motorcyclist who shows up to stare down the professor during one of his lectures? The school dean (Deborah Kara Unger)? Or could it be Gramm’s loyal assistant (Amy Brenneman)?