FauxNixon

What a waste of Al Pacino and Leelee Sobieski in this convoluted Cellular meets Touch of Evil meets Silence of the Lambs.  Even a description like that fails to do justice to what a train-wreck of garbage 88 Minutes constitutes.

Pacino plays Dr. Jack Gramm, a world-famous criminal psychologist who somehow maintains a high-tech firm that seems more like a Washington, D.C., power firm for attorneys than a psychological practice of any kind, and teaches at a nearby university to students eager to become criminal profilers.  Gramm’s graduate assistant for the course and most devoted secret admirer is Kim Cummings (Alicia Witt) and the two team-up to try to determine who has been calling Gramm over a period of time and explaining he has only 88 minutes left to live.

Conveniently enough, to the plot of this monstrosity, Neal McDonough plays a psychotic serial killer on death row due to be executed the very day this is all happening with Pacino.  McDonough’s character accuses Gramm of falsifying evidence and testimony in order to get him convicted and what follows this convoluted scene, premise, and characters is a very awkward and ridiculous attempt at the classic mystery of ‘whodunnit.’

By the time all of the scares and jumps and ungainly plot twists are finished, at the film’s culmination where the true identify of the killer is revealed no one even cares because this movie is so horrendously terrible.  The one saving grace may be that this movie went direct-to-video, but the real mystery I find myself asking about is how such an accomplished group of actors could be roped into such a wretched film.