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Phone Booth
Colin Farrell stars as a slimy New York publicist trapped in a phone box by a sniper - voiced by Kiefer Sutherland - who wants to force him to admit to his sins
First it was delayed in the expectation that star Colin Farrell (Tigerland) would make it big post-Minority Report, then knees collectively jerked when a real sniper started picking people off in the US, but director Joel Schumacher and writer Larry Cohen's Phone Booth finally made it to screens (in the UK at least) in 2003. It's a quintessential piece of high concept cinema. A sniper snares a guy in a phone box. The guy in question is Stu Shepard (Farrell), a New York publicist who's been introduced doing his business on the mobile phone, playing would-be stars and magazine editors off against one another while a put-upon assistant scurries along behind him. He really is a creep: he's rude, he's arrogant, he's a fibber. But he's heading for a comeuppance, of sorts. When Shepard goes to "the phone booth on 53rd and 8th, one of the last of its type still in operation" to call client cum potential conquest Pamela (Holmes) the phone rings. Instinctively he answers. Bad move. There's a crazy guy on the other end (voiced by Sutherland) and he's wielding a high velocity rifle with telescopic sights. The film flags up the sniper's fundamental grievance with a question writ large in a shop window display behind Stu: "WHO DO YOU THINK YOU ARE?". More specifically, the sniper believes he is fulfilling some sort of judicial function, acting as conscience and even executioner of those he considers immoral, sinful. Previous victims include a German pornographer (and secret paedophile) and a corrupt corporate executive. He tells Stu, "You are guilty of inhumanity to your fellow man." This vigilante mission pursues pretty weak logic, and is a flaw in the film. Sure, Stu is a liar who uses skilful deception to manipulate lives, but so do a million people in the media, marketing and entertainment industries. The problem is that the audience has to sympathise with Stu, so although we'd all concede he's a creep, there's still hope for him. The sniper is aggrieved that Stu is playing around behind the back of his wife, Kelly (Mitchell), but he's not actually shagged Pam, he's just thought about it. As he says himself, he's "just a publicist who has fantasies about pretty little actresses". Despite these flaws (and several others - the police procedure and forensic fact in the film seem oddly slapdash), Cohen and Schumacher have made a neat little film. It's greatest asset is not its probing of modern morality, which is muddled, but rather its tension. Like Sidney Lumet's 1975 film Dog Day Afternoon, the situation soon becomes a stand-off, with Stu stuck on the phone to the sniper ("Stu, if you hang up I will kill you" he warns early on, before coldy shooting a nearby pimp to prove he can). Soon he is surrounded by a circus of onlookers, news crews and cops, the latter represented by Whitaker's decent, honest captain. Considering 90 per cent of the action takes place at the one location, the film could have become dull (how many different ways are there of making a phone box look interesting?) but it isn't - the pace is swift, the cinematography and direction inventive (shades of '24', with plenty of split screen), the performances good (Farrell is a versatile chap) and the script snappy. Best of all, the filmmakers don't push proceedings longer than 80 odd minutes. Verdict Schumacher takes another step toward burying memories of Batman & Robin, Farrell moves nearer to leading man status and audiences will be generally satisfied. |
