Phone Booth' is gripping

Stu Shepard (Colin Ferrell) is a successful New York publicist with his fair share of famous clientele. He wears expensive Italian suits and his hair is perfectly tousled. Stu has two cell phones, and a college-aged gopher to hold the one he's not talking on in one hand, and write down everything he says with the other.

What then, is he doing using the last pay phone in New York at 53rd St and Eighth Ave. Well, it turns out that Stu's life revolves around lying -- lying to his clients, to magazines, and to his wife, who checks his phone bills and would notice the regular calls Stu makes to an attractive struggling actress everyday, at the same time. So he uses the phone booth.

But Stu's not all bad. So far, saying "big kiss" on the phone is the closest thing to an illicit relationship he has to this girl, who doesn't know that Stu is married because he even takes his ring off to call her. However, it seems that someone has been watching Stu's life, and does not approve of the way he lives it.

So on the fateful day that Phone Booth takes place, Stu finishes his call as usual, and then makes the mistake of picking up the phone again when it rings immediately after he hangs up. It's instinct, right? The voice on the other end of the line turns out to belong to a grade A psychopath (Kiefer Sutherland), with a penchant for forcing morality on strangers, and a high powered sniper rifle aimed right at Stu's heart. He even demonstrates his shooting ability by grazing the edge of Stu's ear off.

The crazed sniper proceeds to hold Stu hostage in the phone booth, even as the NYPD fills the streets, forcing him to be honest, with himself, his wife and the watching world for the first time in his life. But Stu cannot get off the phone or explain himself, because the sniper proves that he will not hesitate to kill innocent bystanders if Stu does not obey him. Forest Whitaker shows up a negotiator after the sniper takes down a pimp who tries to get Stu off his prostitute's "business phone." To the cops, it looks like Stu is the perpetrator, someone looking for cop-assisted suicide.

This is one of those movies I could pick apart for hours, but at the end of the day, I am still happy that I saw it. This is mainly because director Joel Schumacher took Larry Cohen's script, which occurs entirely in a phone booth, ten days and only $1 million, made a movie that was not horrible. While it was scheduled to be released last year, the date was pushed back because of the Beltway sniper attacks -- which shows some tact on the part of the film's publicists.

Technically, the movie is brilliant -- it has to be. All the shots are of a phone booth, but yet it remains interesting to watch. The film starts off with shots of selections of the more than three million New York cell phone users. The best part about the camera and the editing is when the screen is divided into more than one shot, where secondary action occupies a box filling a portion of the screen as the main action takes place. At some points the screen is divided into four shots. Yet this is never overdone, and serves to alleviate the potential staleness of phone booth shots.

However, the film is not without its fair share of problems, and no amount of camera work can save the script from dragging. There is a certain point where the suspense is at a climax, yet there is still thirty minutes left in the movie, and you are half hoping the sniper will shot somebody, just so something will happen.

This is when you first start to notice the holes in the plot, like how the NYPD thinks that Stu shot the pimp, even though the body was obviously shot in the back by a high-powered rifle, which would be noticeable in a phone booth. Why does the sniper chose Stu as his next victim? The previous victims all committed harsher acts, like pornography and embezzlement, when Stu did not even cheat...yet. Finally, we start to wonder if we even care if Stu gets it or not.

While these criticisms come to mind after scrutiny of the script, the movie is salvaged by Ferrell and Sutherland's gripping performances. Stu is the actor's dream part, and Ferrell takes full advantage, running the gambit from crying in a crumpled heap to screaming with his arms outstretched for the shooter to take his best shot. Sutherland's gravelly bass is the perfect compliment to Stu's instability. He periodically intersperses maniacal giggling in with his demonic quasi-religious demands for Stu's repentance.

While the message of the film may come off as preachy and extremely intense, it is definitely needed in today's world. There will always be people that, like Stu, don't realize that respect is what should make the world go round. All his life Stu dismissed the little guys as inferior, and Sutherland is the kind of crazed psycho that felt the need to point that out.

But don't go see the movie for that... go because the acting is good, and because it's interesting to watch a movie that takes place in real time, in a phone booth and that is nevertheless pretty damn exciting.