Phone Booth | AccessAtlanta

Phone Booth

Colin Farrell is trapped by a killer.

FILM FACTS

Starring: Colin Farrell, Kiefer Sutherland, Forest Whitaker, Katie Holmes and Radha Mitchell
Director: Joel Schumacher
Rating: R for language and some violence
Genre: Thriller, Crime

Discuss this film | Official movie site

On DVD 07/08/03 (R) 80 minutes

Grade: C

Verdict: A kind of "Speed" that goes nowhere.

By BOB LONGINO
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

There are all kinds of telephone movies with a creep on the other end of the line. "Sorry, Wrong Number" with a bedridden target Barbara Stanwyck. "Midnight Lace" with a high-anxiety-prone Doris Day. "When a Stranger Calls" with baby-sitting duck Carol Kane. And perhaps the best of the phone-stalker flicks: "Scream."

Enter "Phone Booth" in the age of speed dial. It's a telephone-user-meets-sniper film that's had problems nobody could predict.

The movie was supposed to debut last year, but then came real-life sniper shootings in and around the nation's capital, and "Phone Booth" got put on hold.

American streets aren't really any safer these days, but 20th Century Fox has decided it's time for "Phone Booth" to poke its head out.

The movie not only lacks the thrills and drama one might hope, it's not even half as terrifying as those Carrot Top commercials for AT&T.

Colin Farrell, the Dublin lad with the perpetual afternoon shadow, plays Stu Shepard, a skanky, entertainment-industry public relations fellow in New York who's got just about everybody on the hook. His poor wife (Radha Mitchell) doesn't know about the girl he's wooing on the side. The poor girl he's wooing (Katie Holmes) doesn't know about the wife he's got at home. His PR assistant doesn't seem to know much about anything, except maybe that Stu isn't paying him.

As a cop says to Stu (after Stu hands him pricey Britney Spears tickets for a favor), "You put the ho in show business."

Like so many of us, Stu is a phone-oholic. He's always on the horn. Every day at the same time, he ditches his cellphone to clean his tracks and uses a phone booth at 53rd and Eighth on the West Side to make his woo calls.

That's when he gets the call. It's from a sniper on the prowl. Blah blah. Shots fired. Blah blah. Some gold chain-wearin' guy falls to the street. Blah blah. Cops show up. Blah blah. Don't hang up the phone or you die!

It's that kind of movie. Actually it's that kind of off-off-Broadway play -- one of those small-cast happening dramas done out of doors.

Almost everything happens in one spot, in that phone booth on a blocked-off Manhattan street.

Somewhere in Hollywood there must be an echo of a studio exec shouting, "Brilliant!" 'cause the sets for this movie cost, like, zilch.

Director Joel Schumacher, who stomped the life out of the "Batman" film series, tries to make up for an actionless action film with split screens, grainy footage and fast-moving pans of nearby buildings.

Farrell, who continues to play in movies that shroud the talent he displayed in Schumacher's little-seen military film "Tigerland," is just OK. He gets to plead, whine, confess, argue, shout and cajole his way through a near mess of a movie.

At least Forest Whitaker, one of Hollywood's underused treasures, shows up as the head cop. He establishes a better connection with Farrell than the crazy on the phone.

Still, it's not enough. There's really no difference between "Phone Booth" and those nagging marketing calls that interrupt dinner.

Just say, "No, thank you," and hang up.