Do you think there are days Al Pacino wakes up, pours himself a double scotch, realizes it’s 10 A.M., drinks the scotch, then looks in the mirror and wonders whatever happened to the films from the seventies?
Back then Al was huge, and the work he was doing was quality films. The Godfather, Serpico, Dog Day Afternoon. These are all great films and Al is great in them. Now he’s been reduced to doing The Recruit and Two For The Money. He could be popping up soon with the Olsen twins in New York Minute: Even Longer. Is it Al that started to slip or was it the films he was making?
Well, a little of both. I think you can actually pinpoint the moment when Al began to overact in films. In the mid eighties he took a break from making movies and then came back at the end of the decade with a fine film called Sea of Love. That lead to Godfather 3 and then he won the Oscar in 1993 for Scent of a Woman. After that award, things started to get worse than inviting Andy Dick to your bar Mitzvah. Al began to play up his characters and lose the subtlety that made his acting so genius in the first place. Watch his performance in Heat (“She’s got a great ass!”) compared to the cool calculating ways of Michael Corleone in Godfather 2.
It’s like Elizabeth Taylor and wedding number 8, you go through the motions but you’re not really there. Don’t get me wrong, Al is still a far better actor than most of the thespians working in film today (yes, I’m talking about you Ashton Kutcher. The biggest Punk’d he ever pulled was convincing people he was a movie star) but he’s no longer turning in performances like he did in the seventies.
Al’s new film coming out this week is 88 minutes and it co-stars a bunch of people who are shocked that they get to spend screen time with the legendary Al Pacino. Well guess what? I’m betting Al is thinking the same thing. He’s probably walking around thinking Benjamin McKenzie and Leelee Sobieski are not fit to catch his falling turds. Al was probably on the set crying in his trailer wondering where Bobby Duvall and Jimmy Caan are, then turned on the TV and caught an old re-run of Las Vegas and realized he didn’t have it too bad.
88 Minutes does revolve around a pretty clever idea. Al’s character must figure out who is trying to kill him because his own murder will occur in 88 minutes. Hopefully, that means the film is not much longer than 88 minutes. Can you imagine if the title of the film was “188 minutes with an Intermission”? While I like the idea for the film, the concept sounds very similar to D.O.A and it sounds even more similar to the D.O.A remake starring has been lovers Denny Quaid and Meg (Yes, this is my real face now please stop staring) Ryan (except he’s not dying as he tries to figure out what is happening).
So a copied concept coupled with Al’s penchant for big gestures leads me to think I’ll be waiting for this one on HBO.
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