The Movie Room

Phone Booth 2002, directed by Joel Schumacher

Rating: 7/10

This movie has the potential to be a cheesy B-movie that is entertaining in the moment but easily forgettable once it’s over. However, so many people worked together to raise this movie above what it seems, and the result is stylish and fun, even if it’s not perfect.

The weakest part of this movie is the dialogue in Larry Cohen’s script. A lot of it does work and helps keep the tension at a consistent boiling point, but there are more than a couple handfuls of lines that just stick out as super cringy. The actors do their best to sell them (even Ben Foster overacting (I assume as per directed) as an up-and-coming rapper) but nothing can save a lot of them. These lines do really keep the movie from being a full-out masterpiece, but I do also kind of have affection for them. This movie is a nostalgic favorite, so hearing those clunkers just makes me think of the early 2000s when this movie came out and they probably sounded more timely, even if still bad. It really does help to have great actors with this script; Colin Farrell is always great, and he sells the sleaziness of his character so well (even if the script goes out of its way to try and reduce his sleaziness by having him only be in an emotional affair instead of a physical one), and Radha Mitchell and Katie Holmes both do good work with little material as the women in his life. Forrest Whitaker also shines as the policeman, as his natural good-naturedness that marks his best performances really helps sell the character. The one main actor that I feel is a bit distracting for the role is Kiefer Sutherland; his voice-acting is chilling, but I feel like having a name actor like him just really distracts from the anonymity; the whole movie Colin Farrell is trying to pin down who his caller is, but instead of being anonymous to the audience its always clearly Jack Bauer or any of Sutherland’s other iconic roles.

Beyond the writing and the acting, this movie is a fantastic piece of production. The color scheme and clothing do really scream early 2000s in a dated way, but otherwise it is fantastic (and even that stuff isn’t bad). Like 127 Hours later or many Brian De Palma films before it, Joel Schumacher does a great job enlivening a single space with great editing and visual tricks and frames within frames that shrink and grow and move around and other such trickery. We also get such a good sense of location, from the tour of phone booths at the beginning and then leading to this isolated booth, to the adult store across the street, to the guy selling toys a little bit over, to the big sign in the windows behind the booth that pointedly ask “Who do you think you are?” The production design, the cinematography, the editing, the directing, and many other facets work together seamlessly to make this look and feel like serious care was taken instead of just “yeah, guy in a phone booth, no need to try hard here.”

This movie is not perfect, but it amazes me at how good it is. It may not be one of the all-time great thrillers like Dog Day Afternoon, which it seems to emulate, but it is a stylish and fun little romp that makes perfect use of its brief runtime.