A publicist steps into a Times Square phone booth to call his mistress and ends up pinned there by a sniper’s red dot. That is the whole engine of Phone Booth, and Joel Schumacher runs it for 81 minutes without letting the man out.
Trailer, via TrailerTrackerEnglish.
Colin Farrell in the Booth
Stuart Shepard is a liar. Larry Cohen’s script makes that plain early: he is cheating on his wife Kelly with a client, Pam McFadden, and he uses a public phone so Kelly cannot trace the call. When the receiver rings back, Kiefer Sutherland’s unnamed caller already knows his name, his marriage and his plans.
The caller has done this before. Two earlier targets — one a pedophile, one guilty of corporate corruption — were each given a chance to confess and refused, and both were killed. Stuart’s version of the test is to tell Kelly and Pam the truth. To prove he means it, the caller fires a suppressed rifle with pinpoint accuracy.
Then the crowd arrives. Three prostitutes want the phone. Leon, their pimp, smashes the glass and beats Stuart while they cheer. The caller offers to make him stop, and Stuart, confused, asks him to. Leon dies on the spot. The women blame Stuart, and the police and the news crews close in.
No options. No lies. No fear. No deals. Just keep talking.
Forest Whitaker and the Siege
Forest Whitaker plays Captain Ed Ramey, the negotiator who seals the area and tries to talk Stuart out of the booth. Ramey also suspects Stuart is the killer. That double position is where the film’s tension actually lives, and Whitaker holds it without raising his voice.
Schumacher keeps the camera inside a box for most of the runtime. It is a stunt, but a disciplined one, and 81 minutes is the right length for it — long enough to exhaust the idea, short enough that it never quite does.
The film premiered at the 2002 Toronto International Film Festival and was set for a November 2002 release. The D.C. sniper attacks that October led 20th Century Fox to delay it. It opened in the United States on April 4, 2003. It grossed $97.8 million worldwide against a $13 million budget, and reviews were generally positive.
The delay is the detail that lingers. A thriller about a hidden rifleman in a city, held back because of a real hidden rifleman in a city, is a piece of timing no studio would choose and no marketing department could buy.
Key facts
– Release: April 4, 2003 (US)
– Runtime: 81 minutes
– Budget: $13 million
– Worldwide gross: $97.8 million
– Score: 6.9/10
What the Booth Cannot Hold
Phone Booth is a one-joke film that tells its joke well. The joke is that a man who has spent his life talking his way out of things finally has to talk his way into the truth, and the only audience that matters is a scope.
What dates it is the premise. A public phone booth as the last private place in New York was already nostalgic in 2003, and it is archaeology now. The film does not care. It wants a box, a crowd and a voice, and it gets all three.
Sutherland is the best thing in it. He is never seen clearly, never named, and never explains himself beyond the two prior tests, which is exactly enough. Farrell has the harder job — he must be unlikeable at the start and worth saving by the end — and he mostly lands it.
The weakness is the ending’s tidiness. A film this cruel about its hero’s vanity should not resolve so cleanly, and the confession arc closes a little too well. Still, the mechanism holds. 6.9 of 10.
Get the Notebook.
The day's best stories and every fresh verdict, in plain English, in your inbox by seven. One email a day, no more.
