Do you love the TV series 24? Would you like to see a film by the same director, using the same "real-time" crime thriller concept and starring academy award winning actor Al Pacino? If the answers to those questions is a resounding YES then you'd be forgiven for having high expectations for a viewing of 88 Minutes by Jon Avnet. Trouble is, you'd be bitterly disappointed.

I watched with a sense of growing disbelief as the man who was once sublimely measured and always watchable as Michael Corleone, Tony Montana, Sonny Wortzik and Frank Serpico, "starred" in what amounted to a dreadfully clichéd and mediocre serial / copycat killer TV movie. Forensic Science Professor Jack Gramm (Pacino), who also helps the FBI in their manhunts, is a hard drinking ladies man with an incident of harrowing personal tragedy haunting his past ..... sound familiar already? How do these screenplays get through to the point of actually getting made? The plot was laughably easy to guess at all the way through.

Al, what on earth are you playing at? You've let me down. Mediocre films have been partially rescued by Pacino in the past - seeTwo for the Money or The Recruit - but here perhaps he knows it's beyond him. It's a lacklustre performance and that's as kind as I'm prepared to be.

Another thing that drew me to this dreadful film in the first place was the news that Jon Avnet is re-uniting Al Pacino and Robert De Niro for the first time since Michael Mann's Heat for his up and coming film Righteous Kill. That forthcoming feature is scripted by Russell Gewirtz, who previously worked on the excellent Spike Lee bank heist thriller Inside Man. Sounds promising, and I hope and pray that Righteous Kill turns out to be as good as 88 Minutes was bad.

If you like your thrillers sans thrills, your plot lines as ludicrous as gills on a monkey and your film characters entirely without plausibility or substance then 88 minutes is for you.