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'Phone Booth' proves unnecessary, unimpressive
By John Behling
Published:
Thursday, April 10, 2003
"When a phone is ringing, someone has to answer it" taunts Keifer Sutherland as the moralistic serial sniper in Joel Schumacher's "Phone Booth." This knee-jerk reaction adequately describes why I went to see Phone Booth. When a good premise comes along, we as the trained cinema consumer must see it.
Stu Shepard (Colin Farrell) is a sharp-dressing, fast-talking New York publicist who makes the mistake of answering a call at a public phone booth. On the other end is a deep-voiced maniac with a rifle who tells Stu "If you hang up that phone, I will kill you."
This is the version of the plot you get from the preview, and frankly, if the film had set it up with that kind of brevity, it would've been a lot better. But no, director Joel Schumacher decides to begin the film with the shot of a satellite, followed by a glitzy shot tracing the call through the circuitry presumably of an entire cellular network.
This shot impressed me the first time I saw it in 1994's "Blown Away," but since then the effect has been lost. This is the director telling us "see... this is how cell phones work," which I'm sure is amazing to maybe... a seven-year-old. But to the rest of us, it's both unnecessary and unimpressive-these terms being applicable to most of the film coincidentally.
As far as unnecessary, the aforementioned shot leads into a documentary style clip informing us of the number of cell phone users in New York City, coupled with shots of busy New Yorkers walking and talking. This bleeds into a Twilight Zone style narration introducing us to the phone booth as a character (oh that's clever) and to Stuart with the introduction "Meet the last person who will use this phone booth." This last statement either implies that the audience is very stupid, or that this stylistic exposition is in some way meaningful. At the risk of sounding redundant, neither is true.
In the realm of unimpressive we have first and foremost Joel Schumacher's direction, which clutters the screen with picture in picture style telephone conversations, time alteration and the flagrant and pointless use of a filter that makes the images look like pastel drawings.
Also, the over-hyped "next big thing" Colin Farrell makes the disappointments list with his frantic "why me?" melodrama. The much more talented Kiefer Sutherland falls victim to rampant vocal effects which causes his poorly written dialogue to sound all too much like "Hello Sidney, do you like scary movies?"
"Phone Booth" is by no means worth seeing, however the circumstances surrounding it are worthy of conversation. Originally scheduled for a November 15, 2002 release, "Phone Booth" was postponed because of the sniper attacking in Va., MD and Washington D.C. This maneuvering seems to imply that it's ok to make a psychotic sniper film, as long as it's timely. And it couldn't be more timely than now when the war has pushed everyone's sniper fears out of their lives.
This correlation between the short-term sensibility of Hollywood and our short-term memories makes one wonder when will we start seeing plane-hijacking comedies once again? (Or for that manner, screwball military comedies?)
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