Movie Reviews

Joel Schumacher's Phone Booth isn't going to win any Academy Awards for best picture, directing, acting, or anything like that. If one of the Oscar categories happend to be something like Most Innovative Blockbuster Hollywood Film, however, it'd probably have a good shot at taking home the top prize.

What I think is so innovative about Phone Booth is how much it does with so little. There are really only three main characters, one of whom is only heard and not seen. There's only one main set, and it's a fairly unassuming phone booth in New York. The plot's about as basic as it gets: a sniper (played by Kiefer Sutherland's Voice) holds a hot-shot media publicist (Colin Farrell) hostage in the phone booth that he uses every day to secretly call one of his clients, a woman he'd like to eventually cheat on his wife with. The sniper insists that Farrell not put down the phone, nor tell anyone what is happening, or he'll be killed.

For a film that takes place almost entirely in one location, it's surprisingly exciting. A lot of the tension comes from circumstances that lead some passers-by -- and later the NYPD -- to believe that Farrell himself is some kind of crazy nut with a gun who's already killed one person, and is ready and willing to kill others.

Some of the characters' transformations and motivations are a little iffy, but it seemed to me that characterization was not high on the list of the filmmakers' priorities. Instead, I almost saw the film as a sort of technical exercise, in which Joel Schumacher tried to make as exciting and tense a movie as possible with the fewest characters, sets, and shooting-days (Phone Booth was filmed in less than two weeks). I think he did a pretty good job.