Flak Magazine: Phone Booth, 04-15-03

Phone Booth plays like a mediocre episode of "Homicide: Life on the Street." It's an 80-minute film that's light on both depth and thrills, yet it won the box office in its opening weekend. This shouldn't be much of a surprise; moviegoers have always been suckers for a thriller — good, bad or otherwise. Last year's Panic Room, another set-centric work, enjoyed the same springtime box office boon and was similarly thin in the script. These modern-day, loud-and-clear thrillers seem as if they should be … better.

They were better: There was a time when we were treated to suspense classics like Rear Window, Vertigo and Notorious. In fact, Hitchcock heard a pitch for an early incarnation of Phone Booth, but passed — probably for the good reason that it wasn't much of a story. The script follows hotshot publicist Stu (Colin Farrell) into a phone booth, where a sniper (Kiefer Sutherland) familiar with his travails traps him through various forms of threat: shooting him, shooting his wife (Radha Mitchell), shooting his girlfriend (Katie Holmes), shooting the nice-guy cop (Forest Whitaker) or worse, telling his wife about his lover. Stu endures puppet games until his inevitable "I'm not hot shit! I'm just shit!" proclamation for the rubberneckers and gathered media. And that's it.

No question why Joel Schumacher jumped all over this one, though. Despite enduring two delays — one because of John Muhammad and John Malvo, the real-life East Coast snipers, and one to properly time the rise of Farrell's star — it's an effortless piece of moviemaking that features one actor on one set and only took 12 days to shoot. (This writer is surprised they couldn't wrap shooting in 6 to 8 hours.) Schumacher is still on his redemption tour, trying to make up for torpedoing the Batman franchise. Phone Booth is half a movie at best, and it made $15 million during its opening weekend — what great returns, especially considering Schumacher's 2002 Chris Rock/Anthony Hopkins summer spy comedy Bad Company opened to less than that; in fact, Phone Booth's opening weekend is more than 20 percent of the gross of Schumacher's first four post-Batman & Robin movies combined.

The director's imprint, however, is the first of the film's many forgettable aspects. His rapid-fire opening sequence and incorporation of inconsequential characters smacks of Michael Bay, and such quick-hitting cinematography doesn't work on what is essentially a stage play. It's not as consciousness-shattering as Arnold Schwarzenegger's Mr. Freeze, but it nevertheless raises more questions in the viewer's mind about the film's scope than it comfortably answers.

Outside of Farrell, the cast disappoints. Sutherland, brought in when Ron Eldard didn't work out, sounds largely like the grizzled phone voice of the Scream killer. Eldard may still have prepubescent tones to his voice, but to sacrifice a finished performance in order to … do what? Usher in a certain sense of irony (since, in "24," Sutherland protects our country against terrorists like his sniper)? It seems like a wasteful way to manage a movie. Why make a move like that, rather than smarten up the story (perhaps, I dunno, Sutherland's character is driving Stu to his wife because he is the father of Stu's lover?).

The guiltiest party involved may be Katie Holmes. She's a gun-for-hire beauty. Five early lines, a few money girl-next-door looks and she's done. For the last 45 minutes — more than half of the movie — she stands silent in the crowd, looking cute and concerned.

It's already cliché to refer to Colin Farrell as the movie's "lone bright spot," but when you get top billing and clinch 77 minutes of screen time in a tepid 80-minute movie, you have no choice but to perform. He plays the too-important pendejo well, flips out when he's supposed to and gets steered with the best of them. Cloaked in the booth by a nearby store's "Who do you think you are?" banner, Stu isn't evil enough to deserve death — heck, he takes off his wedding ring when he calls his girlfriend. His contrition is at all times inevitable. Stu is far from evil, and is only really guilty of being a fast-talking New Yorker working a fast-paced job.

Based on those criteria, the sniper — listed in the credits as The Caller — had millions of candidates, and it's here that the movie begins really falling apart. We're hindered from forming emotions about The Caller because of the mystery he hides behind — is he reassembling lives or destroying them? Is he a part of the lives he affects or is he exacting his God Complex on anyone within reach? Like most thrillers, the point of Phone Booth is for Stu to become a better person because of all he suffers through, but if you're going to tie up 100 percent of the movie's threat and just as much of the protagonist's motivation to change in the same villain, doesn't it seem like you should understand what that villain is about?

The Caller's story is devastatingly undertold, and because of that, the film's moral compass spins in search of true evil. The film would work if this blitzkrieg therapy session stood a chance of failing and Stu could actually perish. The one thing we know about the sniper, though, is that he cares too much about his counselor role to let that happen. And nothing is less suspenseful than inevitability.

— Andy Stilp (andy.stilp at gmail dot com)