There are so many things wrong with the Al Pacino vehicle 88 Minutes that it’s difficult to know where to start. But the fact that it’s nearly 30 minutes longer than the title suggests is as pertinent a place as any.

Pacino plays Dr Jack Gramm, a posturing rock star in the world of forensic psychiatry. He’s an abrasive individual and you’re secretly rather relieved when a mysterious telephone call warns the Doc that he has but 88 minutes to live. The end is in sight at least.

Equipped with a sports car, a bachelor pad and a slipstream of fawning, nubile forensics undergraduates, Gramm is arguably the least professional expert witness ever to have graced the big screen. Any right-thinking judge would throw his evidence out of court for Gramm’s overuse of fake tan alone. And the style of film- making – brash but glaringly inept and with a distasteful fascination for the torture and slaughter of young women – echoes the failings of Gramm as a central character.

The writer/director Jon Avnet (who also directed Pacino in the recent Righteous Kill) relies on fraudulent red herrings and Pacino’s shouty, shoulder-barging acting style. Interestingly, the more overblown and insincere a performance Pacino delivers in a film, the more self-important and bouffant his hair gets. Here, it’s so towering it takes up 90 per cent of the screen.

15, 107 minutes

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