Dir. Joel Schumacher, 2002, UK/US, 80 mins
Cast:
Colin Farrell, Kiefer Sutherland, Forest Whitaker, Katie Holmes
Hot on the heels of last seasons brilliant TV series 24 comes another 'real time' thriller, complete with Keifer Sutherland himself in a key role.
Phone Booth, Joel Schumacher's (Flatliners, Batman, Falling Down) latest effort, stars Colin Farrell (Tigerland, Minority Report, Daredevil) as a pushy, smarmy, self absorbed publicist who picks up a ringing telephone in a phone booth and then is told by a voice on the other end that he will be shot if he hangs up, the little red light from an infrared rifle sight is proof that the caller isn't kidding.
Farrell adopts a convincing NY accent as the nattily-attired Stu Shephard who is held hostage in a phone booth by a sniper who is out to make his life a living hell under the guise of helping him find redemption.
Stu, who is nothing but a smooth talking lying cheat, goes to use a phone booth in the middle of New York City to make his regular call to his girlfriend Pamela (Katie Holmes - Dawsons Creek, The Gift), so that his wife Kelly (Radha Mitchell - Pitch Black, High Art) won't be able to track his cheating. After having called his girlfriend Stu receives a mysterious phone call from a man who claims to have a sniper rifle and will kill him if he hangs up. When Stu answers the phone he is suddenly thrust into a situation where he has zero control. A voice informs him if he fails to live up to his expectations he will be shot. Hilarity and drama unfold as the police commanded by Captain Ramey (Forest Whitaker - Panic Room, The Crying Game) mistake Stu as the real shooter when an argument with a hooker and pimp turns deadly. Moments later, the scene turns into a disaster area with SWAT units and police detectives screaming for Stu to surrender, but he knows that if he hangs up he'll be killed in a second by the sniper.
This is the set-up we get in the first five minutes of the film which continues from there, in real time, and unfolds at a brilliant pace as Stu desperately tries to figure out who the mystery caller. What ensues is a war of the brains and guts and a deadly game of cat and mouse between Stu, the sniper and the police within the confines of a phone booth.
Farrell does an excellent job in the film, as his reactions to his situations are very believable. He keeps his character realistically afraid and stays grounded throughout the picture. The other main character in the film is Kiefer Sutherland (Flatliners, The Lost Boys, A Time To Kill), who plays the sniper keeping Shepherd hostage. His voice acting is chilling and scary enough to make you feel truly frightened for Shepherd. In what is basically a two-man piece, both actors deliver, especially Sutherland, who does not benefit from any true screen time.
Coming in at just under an hour-and-a-half, the film is perfect in length. Schumacher never falls into unnecessary exposition. He realizes that the centre of the piece is the situation that the main character is in and how others feel about it. One of the film's strengths is its ability to make us sympathize with the character's situation. Early on, the film sets up a real element of danger, and when that is mixed with Sutherland's excellent acting and how we hear his voice like he is in the room next door, the film does truly offer up a taut and suspenseful atmosphere.
The script is very fast paced and dialogue intensive. The entire movie takes place in real time on the corner of 8th and 45th Manhattan with the focus being on Stuart. The script plays with mental ideas of fear and paranoia very well, especially as we never see the voice until the very end and then only in a haze.
In Phone Booth the sniper has purposely picked out his targets, explaining that in the past he has killed a child pornographer and a defrauding CEO, and now a deceitful hotshot media consultant. He has a conscience for his victims and picked each of them because they deserve some sort of reform.
Shcumacher explains that "the caller sees himself as invincible. He has decided he has the right to decide who is ethical and moral, and who is not. And he decides the appropriate punishment. The caller is an observer, a voyeur, and extremely intelligent person with a dark sense of humour and strong touch of sadism".
Joel Schumacher was particularly interested in its exploitation of a fundamental fear - the Big Brother concept that someone is watching you - and the loss of privacy in today's world. The most frightening part of the story is that it could happen to anyone. It's a strong tale of urban paranoia.
Schumacher has told a taut, gripping, morality tale whilst Farrell believes that his character makes it through and survives the psychic shake-up he gets from the sniper in the film. "The movie is more than a thriller. It explores a complex character's life-and-death struggle for redemption while undergoing this terrifying ordeal", says Farrell. "In this case the shooter does him a big favour".
Whitaker notes that in addition to the humour and action there's a universality to the story's themes. "What Stu comes to realise in the film is something I think everyone, at some point in there lives, comes to understand; that they have to take a look in the mirror from time to time and re-examine their lives".
Phone Booth marks Schumacher and Farrell's second collaboration following the critically hailed Vietnam-era drama Tigerland, which propelled Farrell to worldwide acclaim and stardom.
The attention that newcomer Colin Farrell, currently in 3 other movies, has received since Tigerland must have done wonders for him, playing the lead role as Stu Shepard in this project that once had the likes of A-list actors such as Jim Carrey, Will Smith and Brad Pitt in talks, it was a big surprise that unknown Colin Farrell took the lead in the end. The film was also originally shot with actor Ron Eldard playing the sniper on the other end of the phone. When director Schumacher went back to film re-shoots, Eldard was replaced with Kiefer Sutherland.
Beyond the presence of golden boy du jour Farrell the main attraction here is the script by veteran auteur Larry Cohen (Return To Salems Lot, Return of the Magnificent Seven, NYPD Blue, The Defenders) who is something of an icon in the independent genre scene. The prolific screenwriter has worked in just about every conceivable genre and Phone Booth marks his return to the majors in a time where there seems to be little reception for his kind of iconoclastic genre-bending voice. While Phone Booth is a less subversive piece of work than expected from him, some vintage Cohen still shines through - it's pre-Guilliana 70's in his New York City, right down to the porn shops, the Baretta-era hookers and the very existence of a working coin-operated phone booth.
"It's very much a New York story" claims Larry Cohen "I set the story in Manhattan because there is so much activity there. I wanted the setting to be a walking-around city, the more congested, the better, so that you're only a pane of glass away from help - yet help is not to be found".
Cohen says that the role of Stu was a great acting challenge for any actor as they had to sustain the audiences interest and the action for the entire movie on their own.
Taking the single-setting of Alfred Hitchcock's Rear Window a step further, this movie takes place entirely within the confines of a New York City telephone booth. It's also possible to compare it to another Hitchcock film, Rope, as it takes place in 'real time'. Sammy Davis, Jr. wrote that Hitchcock had said he always thought he could make a movie about a man in a phone booth. This is also something that Cohen has wanted to do for almost twenty years.
Like the 'four-screens-at-once' of Time Code, this is an ambitious concept, putting a star in the small confines of 3-by-3 feet that makes up a phone booth. The renewed interest in experimentation is a reflection of the exasperation of the "blockbuster formula", a la Batman and Robin, not always working so someone like Joel Schumacher would rather return to making movies with smaller scopes. This sort of movie trades upon "coolness" and innovation, and if it's sold as a mainstream movie, people will want to see it.
Phone Booth has been one of these 'forever-in-development' projects which will finally come to air in America on April 4 and here in the UK on April 18.
After casting delays, the film was pushed further behind from its original release date in America of Nov 15th following the sniper shootings in Maryland during September and October. 20th Century Fox were concerned at the similarity between the premise of Phone Booth - a man trapped by a sniper prepared to kill him - and the real life shootings. However it is accurate to say that the film bears little resemblance to real life except in the method of madness being used. Without giving too much away, there is a motivation for Sutherland's sniper character and what he does is not a random act of madness, as is the case with real life sniper attacks. Terror is what is at the heart of this film, and that is something that people in North America have become accustomed to since the September 11 attacks, but it would be unfair to the film to receive any sort of negative criticism due to its subject and timing.
Ultimately, Phone Booth is a popcorn thriller that will keep you on the edge of your seat for 80 minutes. The film unravels its mystery economically and entertainingly. The film delivers, and audiences should not be disappointed. The basic ideas for this film were good and some of the dialogue carried a hint of dark humour that really appeals. It has a lot to offer an audience, it's a true thriller that doesn't depend on crazy plot twists - just a guy in a phone booth trying to save his own ass from a sniper in a near by building or the cops down the street.
This is the second of three films directed by Joel Schumacher that is getting a release in 2002/2003, preceded by Bad Company and followed by Veronica Guerin.
Funnily enough the last of the phone booths in New York City were removed as they were shooting the film.
Shizana Arshad
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