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'88 Minutes'

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BY RAFER GUZMÁN | rafer.guzman@newsday.com

April 18, 2008

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.

The movie opens with a familiar attention-getter: a faceless man breaking into an apartment to torture an attractive girl, who, as luck would have it, only moments ago peeled down to her lingerie. Nylon rope and pulleys are employed, as is a naughty little tool covered with spikes. It's sadistic, disgusting and the very reason you bought your ticket and a large popcorn. Director Jon Avnet knows this, and he obligingly fills the next hour or so with more hogtied lovelies than a Nazi porn film.

The perpetrator, aside from Avnet, is an all-purpose pervert named Jon Forster (Neal McDonough), also known as the Seattle Strangler. Al Pacino plays Jack Gramm, a forensic psychiatrist whose testimony helped convict the killer. But nine years later, as Forster faces execution, police begin discovering identical murders that not only point to Forster's innocence but possibly implicate Gramm. And soon, Gramm is receiving chilling phone calls counting down his time on Earth: 88 minutes.

Pacino knows how to rise to an occasion, and he doesn't disappoint here. His Gramm is an appealingly wry, even cocky action-hero whose primary weapon is a pair of eyes that can probe any psyche, especially a female one. Sporting a rakish goatee and the untamed locks of an aging rock star, he flirts so smoothly with his pretty young castmates (Leelee Sobieski, Alicia Witt) that it's easy to forget he turns 68 next Friday.

The script, by Gary Scott Thompson, dutifully touches all bases (faithful assistant, curmudgeonly old cop, girl-on-girl action) and ends with several mouthfuls of complicated exposition. But if you lower your expectations and keep a sense of humor, even that large popcorn will seem worth the money.

88 MINUTES (R). Al Pacino races against the clock to save his life and keep a killer behind bars. 1:45 (violence, torture, nudity, profanity). At area theaters.