Pacino thriller '88 Minutes' is a waste of at least 88 minutes

It may be time for Al Pacino to retire. He's had one of the great acting careers in the history of film and it's actually painful to see him playing an aged caricature of himself in an action movie as preposterous, empty-headed and tedious as "88 Minutes."

His character is Dr. Jack Gramm, a Seattle "forensic psychologist" who teaches at the university and works part-time for the FBI. (Like all Hollywood films set in Seattle, this one was filmed in Vancouver B.C.)

Dr. Jack has a "vendetta" against serial killers (one vivisected his baby sister) and in the film's 1997 prologue, his impassioned testimony convicts a charming Ted Bundy-like monster who we got to see torture, rape and murder a young woman.

Nine years later, on the morning of the day this guy is finally about to be executed, a copycat killer known as "the Seattle Slayer" sends the doctor a threatening message telling him that he too will die that day, and, in fact, has only 88 minutes to live.

As those minutes transpire in something close to real time, director Jon Avnet fills them with a bombing, a shootout, more murders, a conspiracy as complex as "The Da Vinci Code" and more suspects than "Murder on the Orient Express."

It's an incorrigibly poor movie: ineptly shot, devoid of any real suspense, so improbable at every turn that it's unintentionally goofy, filled with misogynistic violence designed to titillate the worst instincts of an audience of serial-killer groupies.

At 68, Pacino still has the chops to give a scene a moment of raw power. But it's clear he could care less about this story, his performance has no conviction, and he's mostly emitting sparks of self-parody.