Phone Booth film review

certificate_15

PHONE BOOTH

A man unwittingly answers a public phone and finds himself talking to a sniper who threatens to kill him if he hangs up. It's an absorbing premise, and one that has consumed screenwriter Larry Cohen for the past thirty years, since first discussing the idea with legendary director Alfred Hitchcock. In the intervening years, the project attracted some of the biggest names in Hollywood, including Steven Spielberg and Mel Gibson, but all balked at the prospect of successfully sustaining the drama over the entire length of a movie. Although director Joel Schumacher has made a valiant attempt, the resulting Phone Booth only serves to prove the others' doubts were well founded.

The challenge of trying to confine the action to a phone booth is an exercise that is of more interest to the writer than the viewer. The irony is that having imposed such rigid parameters, both writer and director are only too willing to discard them when expedient. Rather than develop the claustrophobic tension of being couped up, an approach masterfully achieved by Sidney Lumet in Twelve Angry Men, Schumacher cuts away frequently in what transpires to be a far more conventional format than the one originally devised.

Colin Farrell is rapidly proving himself to be one of the most vibrant stars in the Hollywood firmament. Here, his impassioned energy overcomes many of the film's shortcomings to retain a level of engagement. Farrell plays the slick-talking publicist Stu Shepard. To prevent his wife questioning his cell phone bill, Stu regularly uses the last remaining phone booth in Manhattan (testimony to the film's long gestation period) to call Pam (Katie Holmes), a waitress he covets. When the phone rings, Stu picks it up because, according to the measured voice at the other end (Kiefer Sutherland), "a ringing phone has to be answered, doesn't it?"