Starring Al Pacino, Alicia Witt, Leelee Sobieski, and Neal McDonough. Rated 14A.

Vancouver stubbornly refuses to surrender its identity while doubling for Seattle in 88 Minutes, a thriller so shabbily executed that director Jon Avnet doesn’t even bother to obscure local street signs and newspaper kiosks. We know right away that our only hope for any sort of sustained professionalism is Al Pacino as aging babe magnet Dr. Jack Gramm. Jack is the sort of rock-star psychiatrist and university professor you only see in hopelessly dated serial-killer movies. But he does seem to have a knack for helping to put psycho murderers behind bars.

One of those killers is Jon Forster (Neal McDonough). Dubbed the Seattle Slayer, Forster is about to be executed for torturing and murdering a young woman. But all is not well in Jack’s cozy academic sanctuary: he starts getting these creepy phone calls from some frog-voiced weirdo saying he has exactly 88 minutes to live.

After that, we get nagged by Jack’s ringtone a lot. Sporting a mangy goatee and an exaggeratedly shaggy toupee, Pacino prowls our streets looking a bit like an escaped circus lion with a cellphone glued to his ear. Things poke along in the standard psychological-thriller kind of way. (Jack’s sporty car gets vandalized and a detective buddy informs him that someone is imitating the Slayer’s grisly method of murdering women and stringing them up.) Along the way, Pacino gets to bark some very dumb lines. “She was a prostitute?” he exclaims while investigating one of his more suspicious one-night stands for clues. “She told me she was some sort of law student!”

When he’s not humping strangers, Jack deduces that Forster is tormenting him from prison with outside help. But who could the Slayer’s demented partner be? The student (Leelee Sobieski) smitten with Jack? Jack’s assistant (Alicia Witt), who’s even hotter for him? Or one of several other suspects that screenwriter Gary Scott Thompson trots out with shameless abandon? Who cares, really? Of course, it may interest you that 88 Minutes runs 20 minutes longer than the title suggests. Now that’s a crime worth getting upset about.