2003 / 81 Minutes / R
Reviewed by Dale Nauertz

For those of you who haven’t noticed it yet, Colin Farrell is an amazing talent. He’s young, handsome and charismatic. He can be cocky, he can hide his Irish accent expertly (though if I had an accent that cool, I’d be using it all over the place) and it’s usually a very good movie if he isn’t the best part of it. “Minority Report”, for example, was a great movie and he was just one of the little things that made it so good. He took a role that could easily have been the most hateful man in the movie (the guy is chasing down Tom Cruise, after all) and invests it with so much wit and panache that you can’t help but root for the guy, at least a little. After all, like Tommy Lee Jones’s star-making turn in “The Fugitive”, Colin is just a guy trying to do his job. Well, as good as he was in his brief turn in “Minority Report”, he’s much better with much more screen time in “Phone Booth”. Colin Farrell has been on his way to major stardom for a while now. After this movie, he will have achieved it. This movie is the sort of one-man show that legends are made of.

But let me not get ahead of myself. First of all, let me tell you the plot of the film and then maybe you’ll have some idea why I see loads of money and fame in this dude’s future. “Phone Booth” is the story of a self-absorbed PR man who gets his due, and then some. He’s a fast-talking liar, snappy and full of himself, but with the wit and bravado to make this all work in his favor. He’s a very slick guy who gets basically everything he wants. Well, not quite everything. His charms have not yet landed him in the pants of a young actress (Katie Holmes) he has been attempting to seduce. He calls this young vixen every day from the same phone booth, taking off his wedding ring whenever he does so, to talk her into sharing a hotel room with him one day. Unbeknownst to him, a mentally unbalanced gentleman (Kiefer Sutherland, with a voice that could chill an erupting volcano) has taken an interest in his daily phone calls and has decided to teach him a lesson. He has a sniper rifle aimed on Colin, you see, and he’s trying to achieve Colin’s redemption…even if it kills him.

The entire movie is a game of cat and mouse in which we don’t even see the cat. Kiefer Sutherland is no more than a disembodied voice on the other end of a phone line for most of the film, and he still makes for a menacing foe. And part of Kiefer’s instructions is that if Colin leaves the phone booth, he dies. Therefore, the movie concerns a single location, one man at that location, a voice on the phone, and a group of police who soon become involved. And yet, it’s the most gripping film of this young year and the most absorbing thriller since last year’s “Panic Room”. And, like “Panic Room”, it has Forest Whitaker as a kindly man in a bad situation. This time, though, Forest is on the right side of the law. And he’s just as good as he was in “Panic Room”, which is to say that he is great. All three of the main actors in this film are excellent, particularly Colin Farrell, because he really has to be. Anything less than a brilliant performance on his part and the movie, lively and slick as it is, falls to pieces. Colin is the character we have the most invested in. Colin is the character we spend the most time with. And if Colin doesn’t work, nothing does. But Colin Farrell is awesome here. He gives the sort of performance that acting schools can analyze and talk about for years to come, a sweaty, cocky, blistering performance that speaks of oceans of character hidden beneath the surface. He is nothing short of fascinating here and I think he stands a chance of being remembered come Oscar time. Kiefer does a splendid job here too, creating menace out of the simplest inflections of his voice and making us never quite sure where he is going with this. We empathize with Colin and we twist with discomfort just as he does.

The movie does a great job of never tipping its hand and never letting you know what could happen next. It’s refreshing. You feel the claustrophobia of the phone booth, but you are never constricted by it. That phone booth feels bigger in this movie than the entire world has felt in a lot of movies. The entire world is boiled down in a microcosm in that phone booth. You can feel the stagnate heat of that booth, feel the sweat pouring off Colin, feel the frustration and discomfort of the situation with palpable intensity. In that regard, this film does an amazing job. It’s not quite perfect, however. The ending is a bit weak (though satisfying, for reasons that have everything to do with Colin’s magnetic performance). Hmm. That’s about all I can think of. The ending is a little weak. Otherwise, it’s a riveting, tightly wound and explosive little film with a message.

It’s the sort of movie that Alfred Hitchcock would have been proud of, which makes it all the more amazing that it’s by the director of “Batman and Robin”. I suppose this is his penance for that film, his way of making amends. And, by God, he nearly does it. This is an extraordinary bit of filmmaking. The editing, pacing, music and momentum of the movie are fantastic. Joel Schumacher has expressed a mood and a feel that I never thought him capable of, and delivered a dandy little thriller that has haunted me for days.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 8th, 2003 at 4:23 pm and is filed under Dale's Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.