Phone Booth

Rating:
Summary: Busy Signal
Review: Phone Booth is a thriller that, on the surface, sounds like it would be a real good idea. It's got a cool premise and a solid cast, too bad the final product nearly wastes all of that potential.

Stu Shepard (Collin Farrell) is a married man who uses the last remaining old-fashioned phone booth in New York City for calls to his girlfriend, Pam (Katie Holmes). He calls at the same time every day from a place he feels his wife (Radha Mitchell) will never find evidence on the phone bills. It's a booth located in the heart of busy, downtown Manhattan, and it's about to be retired and replaced soon with a more exposed telephone kiosk. But today it's all Stu's, his privacy secure. That is, until a sniper (Kiefer Sutherland) targets him for his personal amusement, making him jump through hoops, seeing how far Stu is wiling to go to stay alive.

Written by Larry Cohen and directed by the hit or miss Joel Schumacher, the film starts out pretty well. Sutherland makes a great bad guy and I enjoyed the way he played with Stu's head. It's interesting to note how intense it gets and then toward the end it gets just ridiculous. Other problems: The female roles are underwritten and Farrell's character is not someone to root for. Schumacher tries to get snazzy by employing techniques used in the TV show 24. It works only because it's now a recognized technique, not as an innovation or in a new way.

The DVD includes an audio commentary by Schumacher. The track connects the dots for viewers but that's all. Nothing really to "write home about". The film's theatrical trailer is the disc's only other extra. The release also allows you the option to watch the movie in either full frame or widescreen formats.

Phone Booth is watchable, only if, to see Sutherland playing the villian.


Rating:
Summary: great great greiiiiiiiiiit!!!
Review: This movie was not veeery original BUT, there's a but! it was goood I held my breath until the end, Farrel is playing is arse off!! of course the idea of someone trapped <somewhere> is common but girls please that was the Irish bad boy (and that was good!!) the movie is short less than 2 hours and there was a great surprise at the end but I won't spoil it !!! enjoy...
>>>>> Nelly

Rating:
Summary: Pretty entertaining
Review: Phone Booth is a pretty Entertaining film and I must say That Collin Farell gave his finest in this film. The plot is very simple and I won't even tell you since there are hundreds of reviews you can easily look down to and see. Who'd think that a movie that takes place in a phone booth would be so entertaining. Yes the whole film pretty much takes place in one spot. I enjoyed it but it wasn't all that great. Pretty average film but enjoyable and I must agree with the other reviewer the ending in this film is kind of lame and sort of a cheap way to end it.

Overall I enjoyed this film but not without its flaws and pretty average story though I give Collin Farell Credit for his acting(though I really don't like him I think he sucks at acting but then again what do I know about good acting..)

3.1 OUT OF 5 stars..

Lates

Rating:
Summary: Just Hang Up
Review: With a highly talented cast and a premise that intrigues and has the potential for the makings of a pretty darn good movie, this movie falls short one bad way.

Colin Farrell plays a Manhattan publicist with nothing about him that is even remotely likable. When the movie opens, we learn that he is married, and is planning on meeting up with one of his clients, a naive, small town girl played by Katie Holmes, who really believes that he cares for her. We learn this in between phone calls meant to convey that this character, Stu Shepard, is basically a jerk.

Stu's trouble begins when he has to use a public telephone in order to contact the would-be mistress, Pamela (Holmes). The Caller (Keifer Sutherland), a sniper located in a window not too high above him, begins his little reign of terror. He calls Stu, and unable to resist the sound of a ringing telephone, the idiot picks it up.

All the action takes place around this phone booth for the rest of the movie, which would have been okay if fifteen minutes into the movie, I didn't hate Stu so much that I wanted to just see him crack already. The Caller knows what a jerk he is, and he is out to make him confess his dirty secrets, you see.

It was sort of a waste of film for me because I concluded from the first scene or so that Stu would be doing everyone a favor if he just hung up and took the bullet. He doesn't deserve his devoted wife, nor does he deserve his potential mistress. He is a complete jackass and because he is such a repulsive character, the movie is fatally flawed.

In saying that, I hope the reader understands that this is not coming from a militant man-hater. It's just that Stu hasn't a single redeeming quality. He is a pathetic creature and even as the movie progresses and we are meant to see a change in his character as the enormity of the pain he causes is realized, I got the feeling that if he survived all of this, he would be using the story to pick up chicks six months later.

I say this also with the understanding that the character of Stu isn't supposed to be a nice guy. He's just so not nice that you don't even want to root for him to change. He is the star of the movie, the hero, so to speak, and while I realize that this wouldn't work with a character that was generally a nice guy, even a collosal jerk like Stu has to have something in his demeanor that makes the audience sit at the edge of their seats hoping he makes it out of there alive, or the movie simply feels like the longest 80 minutes of your life.

I won't spoil it, but the ending was a bit of a rip-off. It was cheesy, when up until that point, cheesy would not have entered my vocabulary in the description of this film.

The idea was great, but the execution of it was flawed by one vital point, that's all. Farrell did such a good job at being a jerk that he ruined the movie. Even his good looks were marred in playing this character.

Truly disappointing.