Who in the world is Joel Schumacher?

Phone Booth

Considering that, by 2002, I had a cell phone which did not look like a black piece of brick, the movie is probably horribly outdated. Cell phones are nothing new anymore and were not at the time. Granted, The Matrix was only 3 years old but that was style; people still use screensavers with these green, vertically running Japanese letters just because it looks good, not because any of the screens nowadays need it. (Do you remember why screensavers were there in the first place?)

So parts of Phone Booth just looks ridiculous. In terms of “artistic vision”, Phone Booth has practically none. It’s pretty cool how it’s focused on just a single street and a single phone booth, but the beginning and the ending sequence were just too ridiculous for their own good. Bad directing could have screwed up the film, but luckily it didn’t.

In fact, Phone Booth was much better and much more suspenseful than you’d think from a generic Hollywood title. The makers were inspired by a Hitchcock idea of having the entire film play in a phone booth, and the implementation of the sniper who threatens him is quite awesome. The story of the film, i.e. Larry Cohen’s screenwriting, is surprisingly great. Having to base the entire story about the phone booth and make it sound believable is not that easy; Hitchcock, the master himself, gave up on it. Sure, the sniper is a psychopath who has a double morale by killing an innocent person and it would have been nice to get to know more about him, but ultimately this wicked character made for a good story. The main character, Stu, is also fairly interesting. From the beginning when we meet him as the wife-cheating, arrogant publicist until the point when he breaks down, he made through quite a bit of character development while staying believable. I even liked Forest Whitaker’s character who was comparably more bland but quite likable.

Instead, Phone Booth was a huge box office hit. It cost 10 millions to make and returned 97. Deservedly so, because the thing Hollywood really needs the most are fresh ideas like these. We started watching Phone Booth with the expectation that it’ll be a silly Hollywood film which we will be able to predict easily. Boy were we wrong.