Phone Booth

To say that schlockmeister Larry Cohen (The Stuff) has been hawking his script for Phone Booth around Hollywood for an absolute age is a brutal understatement. Indeed, this is one of those film projects that has been around forever. First, it was earmarked as a vehicle for Will Smith, then Jim Carrey, then Ed Norton, but having passed through the hands of bombastic director Michael Bay (Pearl Harbour) and into the lap of Joel Schumacher, Phone Booth has finally come to pass with Dubliner du jour Colin Farrell in the lead role.

Set almost entirely in an actual phone-booth, the film sees Colin cast as Stu Shepard, a nasty yuppie publicist type, replete with raspberry shirt and sycophantic underling. His cockiness takes a bit of a bashing when a routine visit to a call box sees him fall victim to a moralising sniper (Sutherland, doing a brilliant impression of his dad), who’s determined to make Stu come clean about his extra-marital activities and general selfish proclivities.
In no time, the booth is beseiged by local hookers, suspicious law enforcement types, Stu’s missus (Mitchell), Stu’s mistress (Holmes), and police negotiator/therapy graduate Forest Whitaker. Of course, Stu can’t tell them what’s going on, lest he recieve a bullet in the head for his efforts, so a massive stand-off ensues.

There may be holes in the plot (womanising media type was the most evil man the sniper could find in New York? Couldn’t someone direct him to the Pentagon?), and as with similar experiments involving the unities of time/space/etc, such as Nick Of Time, the action threatens to become oppressively insular. Schumacher, though, does a bang-up job of making the claustrophobia attendant to this enterprise work well in its favour. He also fashions a remarkably buzzy piece for one that’s cooped up in a phone-box, utilising split-screens and mulitiple perspectives to fantastic tension-building effect.

It’s Farrell, however that makes the movie. His transformation from strutting, cocksure slimeball to gibbering wreck is a wholly convincing one. Besides, it’s a lot easier to picture Farrell having a a couple of birds on the go at once than it is with Jim Carrey.