Phone Booth Review
by Jon Popick (jpopick AT sick-boy DOT com)April 3rd, 2003
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There really isn't much to say about Phone Booth that isn't already obvious to anyone who has seen the film's trailer. Its very simple story places asshole Manhattan publicist Stu Shepard (Colin Farrell, Daredevil) in the eponymous phone booth for just about the entire film. We know there's a revenge-minded sniper with a high-powered rifle trained on Stu. We know the cops try to intervene. All that's left to learn is whether Stu gets killed, winged, or emerges from the booth unscathed.
And that's about all there is to Booth's setup, which hips us to how unlikable Stu is and how New York is teeming with people who might want to take him out. This eats up only about 12 minutes - pretty streamlined by today's standards. But for a film that boasts a running time equal to The Wild Thornberrys Movie, Booth could have been trimmed even more - like with a title card that reads "Arrogant Prick" over Stu's mug. Instead, we see Stu waltzing through traffic and juggling multiple cell phone calls as he simultaneously schmoozes and dismisses everyone in sight.
Like he does every day at exactly the same time, Stu stops at a phone booth at 53rd and 8th to call his girlfriend-slash-client (Katie Holmes, Abandon) so his wife (Radha Mitchell, Pitch Black) won't see the number turn up on any of his cell phones. The two talk, but when Stu hangs up, the phone rings, and the fun starts. Stu turns into a sniveling little bitch within minutes, but the sniper has much more planned for our unlikable hero.
Director Joel Schumacher (Bad Company), whose last good film coincides with the height of Stallone's Hollywood heyday, adds split-screens, rotoscoping and pop-up windows to the mix, which, in addition to Matthew Libatique's (Requiem For a Dream) gritty photography, should keep viewers visually interested in Booth, even if they have big problems with the story. Like Speed, there's a lot of really implausible stuff here, but that doesn't stop it from being a whole lot of fun. Larry Cohen's script calls for the film to unfold in real-time, making it particularly funny when the sniper turns out to be 24's Kiefer Sutherland, who is apparently limiting himself to real-time projects these days. Aside from the voice of the killer in Scream, Sutherland's is the creepiest in recent memory.
Sutherland was actually a last-minute addition to the film. Booth was shot with Ron Eldard as the sniper, but reshoots replaced him with Sutherland (which is why you don't see him until the end). Booth, which was originally tapped to be one of last year's big holiday films, wound up being delayed because of the whole Beltway Sniper business. I was hoping Booth would be a little more claustrophobic, but that may have been too tough to sustain for 80 minutes. Farrell does well at being a dick and still earning a bit of sympathy, if not solely for having to co-star with a pair of giant caterpillars that seem to have made a home just above his eyes.
1:23 - R for pervasive language and some violence
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