|
Volume CXXXII, Number 20 |
 |
Phone Booth rings in for action
MONICA GUZMAN
COLUMNIST
Critics. A lovely bunch. Falling on various points on the line that divides film as art and film as entertainment, they usually have things pretty well figured out-offering a fair and balanced critique of the gems and the junk that grace our screen. But sometimes, quite frankly, they scare me.
Phone Booth, Joel Schumacher's latest thriller, has gotten nothing but jeers in most major reviews. It's too "corny," "flaky," "contrived," "stuck up," blah-di-blah-di-blah. Having learned to trust their general gist, I took my seat tentatively at the theater last weekend, ready for another spring dud. But once the credits rolled, I found myself wondering if these guys just tried their damnedest not to have fun. I searched for evidence and for a second it made eerie sense. Look at Roger Ebert-does he look like an outgoing kind of guy? No, not so much.
About ten minutes into the film, I realized my own picky wanna-be critic voices did not need to be silenced for me to enjoy myself; they were happy, cheery voices, waving their pom-poms around and doing somersaults in my head. This was an immensely enjoyable film, something actually worth rooting for.
Irish superstar Colin Farrell plays Stu Shepard, a New York City publicist with a talent in cleverness and trickery and a lifetime consumer of money morals and designer Italian suits. He is introduced to us as a well-honed player in media circles, a hip joker with images to sell, the most important being his own.
As he does every day, he calls his girlfriend Pam (Katie Holmes) from the phone booth on 52nd Street. But today is utterly different. The phone in the booth rings, Stu picks up, and things start getting interesting. For the rest of the film, Stu is taunted and tortured by the sniper on the other line, watching him from any of hundreds of windows overhead, with any of a hundred motives.
It's not easy to keep a one-location film interesting for more than an hour, but Phone Booth managed to do just that. Although Stu never left the area around the phone booth, the scene around him was always in constant flux and movement. First, a relatively innocent New York street. Next, a crowd gathers. Soon, the cops arrive. Then Stu can see himself on the TVs across the street.
Kudos to the cinematography as well. Without any explosions, car chases, or high-tech gun battles-even with the good guy and the bad guy standing completely still most of the time-this film can still be called an action movie. This is all thanks to the frenzied camerawork, which seemed to do all the running around for them. Schizophrenic, spasmodic, and sometimes having what you could call a split personality, the camera was far more insane than the sniper, whose methods paled in comparison. 52nd Street became a shooting range through its eyes, a battlefield, target practice. I didn't always know if I was seeing through Stu's eyes, the sniper's, or some third party; but always, I felt like I too was aiming at something.
All money-grubbing moviemaking and impressive action techniques aside, the critics were very much right on at least one point: the acting was pretty terrible. Colin Farrell, who suddenly erupted on the screen last year in Minority Report and hasn't been able to let go since, plays the part well enough to keep us interested, but not with enough real vigor to flex his acting muscles (if he's got any-I have yet to see them). Forest Whitaker, the stereotypically sympathetic head cop, practically a copy of the Family Matters guy in Die Hard, came off saying his lines like he was in a "The More You Know" NBC "morality outreach" public service announcement. The voice of the sniper, done by Kiefer Sutherland, star of 24, was admittedly creepy, but probably would have fit better on a cartoon villain. Katie Holmes whined even more on the phone than she ever did on Dawson's Creek; heck, the whole cast acted like they were on some overplayed television rerun.
All in all, the camera, the editing, and the plot were the film's saving graces. Though it's certainly not Oscar-worthy by any standards, Phone Booth is no spring dud; this is one of the only movies out there right now that could be worth your time and money. "A ringing phone has to be answered, doesn't it?" Go ahead. Pick it up. You know you want to.
|
FastCounter by bCentral |