Frothy Paradise

The best thing about 88 Minutes is the title. Jon Avnet’s movie bumbles along for twenty minutes, at which point Dr. Jack Gramm (Al Pacino) is informed by a gravelly phone call that he has eighty-eight minutes to live. We then switch into real time, and the countdown begins, allowing us to calibrate precisely how much more of the film we have to suffer through. Avenet is setting a noble example here: if all movies were named after their running times, Hollywood would instantly become a brisker place. Would Peter Jackson have dared to put us through a Tolkien trilogy called Nine and a Quarter Hours of Elves? I don’t think so.