Director Joel Schumacher has had a very uneven career that includes more crap than caviar, but perhaps now he has produced his best work to date with the tense “Phone Booth.”
This is the man who ruined the whole Batman franchise but also brought us “The Lost Boys.” He now seems to be in the midst of an artistic blossoming of sorts (not including the horribly conceived “Bad Company” last summer).
Throwing away the fake flash of his past films (“Flatliners” and “Falling Down”), he has simplified his style to tell a straightforward and exciting story. He has finally escaped his glitzy Hollywood chrysalis to make films that are worthy of the false respectability his box-office success has given him.
In “Phone Booth,” Colin Farrell, who first grabbed Hollywood’s attention in Schumacher’s “Tigerland” and has been a hot commodity ever since, plays a fast-talking New York publicist who has the bad luck of answering the phone call of a self-righteous sniper (Kiefer Sutherland) set to punish the wicked. It seems that Sutherland doesn’t approve of Farrell’s profession or his unethical attitude toward his marriage, so he holds him hostage in a phone booth on a busy New York street threatening him with death if he hangs up.
To prove his resolve, the sniper shoots and kills an angry pimp who gets violent with Farrell when he refuses to get off the phone, setting in motion a tense standoff with the police who think Farrell is responsible for the murder. Schumacher and screenwriter Larry Cohen creatively design and handle the situation to perfection.
The only false note in the film is the reason behind the anonymous sniper’s choice of Farrell. The audience learns that his previous victims were child molesters and immoral, greedy Wall Street weasels who cheat people of their life savings. Farrell’s only crime is that he is thinking about cheating on his wife.
In failing to make the main character less sympathetic, the motivations of the sniper are almost illogical even for a homicidal redeemer. If Farrell had committed adultery rather than just contemplated it, his targeting would be more believable. (And considering the bad acting from Radha Mitchell, who plays the wife, I don’t think the audience would blame him.)
Despite its few (very few) flaws, the film combusts brilliantly thanks to its ingenious filmmaking. Except for the opening sequence, the film is set entirely in and around the phone booth occupied by Farrell. Despite the claustrophobic milieu, the filmmakers manage to create a very suspenseful gimmick film that would make Hitchcock proud and Brian DePalma weep for not thinking of it himself.
The film is short, running slightly more than an hour and 20 minutes, but a longer film would definitely decrease its impact. Those looking for a quantitative rather than a qualitative value for their movie dollar should probably wait for a re-release of Kevin Costner’s “The Postman,” but I wouldn’t hold my breath for that atrocity to happen. In the unlikely case of Costner’s monstrosity hitting the silver screen again, repent all sins for the end is nigh.