Phone Booth (2002)-"R"

Run Time:81 minutes

3 stars out of 4

Phone Booth (2002), delayed from its US theater for nearly six months due to the 'Beltway Sniper' killings, is definitely one of director Joel Schumacher's better films. I must say that I held out little hope for this film, due to Schumacher's last bust Bad Company (2002), but I actually ended up being pleasantly surprised. Phone Booth, at a brisk running time of under 90 minutes, never lets down its tension throughout the film. The plot is based on a simple premise: a man answers a ringing phone in a booth and is told he will die if he gets off. The man, hotshot-asshole publicist Stuart Shepard (played surprisingly well by Colin Farrell), at first doesn't believe the cryptic, Vincent Price-meets-Moses voice on the other end, and treats the situation like he does all others, like a dismissive jerk whose valuable time is being wasted. The psycho (voiced by Keifer Sutherland) on the other line, however, soon manages to convince Stu that he is serious by shooting a lowlife pimp (played by John Enos, the III) right next to the phone booth with his telescopic sniper rifle. The pimp's noisy prostitutes think Stu has shot the man and a police standoff, negotiated by the perceptive and patient Captain Ramey of the NYPD (Forest Whitaker). The suspense only increases from there as the sniper's instructions become more and more dangerous and the police more and more frustrated with Stu. Schumacher and writer Larry Cohen do much with the amazingly small setting, limited merely to the phone booth itself and a small portion of the city block, and we never lose our interest despite the limited movements of the small cast. That's not to say by any means, however, that Phone Booth wasn't without its problems. Probably the most annoying of these is the voice of the sniper himself. The deep, cold-hearted voice is perfectly clear through the speakers in the theater and therefore completely unbelievable. No one, be him brilliant psychopath or not, actually has a voice like, barring of course actors hired to sound like that. The voice only works to further distance the viewers from the already implausible plot. As soon as shots are fired, everyone's first instinct is to run and get away, regardless of creepy phone calls, and Cohen's script does not do enough to address this issue in the plot. Additionally, the movements and perfect foresight of the sniper ring false to viewers. Nothing goes that perfectly to plan in real life, especially in a place as crowded and unpredictable as downtown New York. Still, the feeling among viewers that such a situation could happen is strong enough for Phone Booth to work, reinforced by the memory of the ease with which John Lee Malvo and John Allen Muhammad killed 10 people in the Washington D.C. area last year. Schumacher even manages to slip in some minor social commentary on the death of privacy in modern America. Though Phone Booth suffers from a few major flaws, it still manages to sustain edge-of-your-seat tension and deliver solid performances from both Whitaker and Farrell, and for a Joel Schumacher thriller, is surprisingly engaging.