Force Fed Films: Phone Booth (2002)

Today Puneet gave me Phone Booth to watch. Ever since my misstep with Ocean's Thirteen, I've been paranoid whether or not I've seen a movie or not. And I had that feeling with this movie as well. While watching it, a lot of it seemed very familiar, but not all of it. It could be it was on in the background years ago, or maybe it was shown on tv and I only caught parts of it. It's hard to say. But at any rate I watched it with (almost) new eyes. Hit the jump to see what I thought of this slightly familiar film.


Phone Booth is one of those movies with a premise that is very hard to sell. Basically a guy gets trapped in a phone booth by a sniper who wants to make him confess his sins. That's it pretty much. But what that description doesn't tell you is that it also packs a lot of tension into this short movie.

The lead is played by Colin Farrell. I've never really looked at him and thought "leading man" although he's certainly done his fair share. He just isn't one of those movie stars that makes me really want to see whatever they're in. Sure enough, as the movie starts out he's just this annoying character who is just mean and completely unlikable. But this really is the point of the movie. As it progresses, his character Stu Shepard becomes more and more sympathetic as the caller tortures him and plays mind games on him. Not only that, but Colin Farrell's performance seems to really open up as well, and the speech he gives at the end is strong and very believable.

Just your standard self absorbed jerk

In addition to Colin Farrell the movie stars Forest Whitaker as a police negotiator and Kiefer Sutherland as the super creepy sniper on the other end of the phone. The caller is probably my favorite character in the whole movie just because of how intense and creepy he can sound. As for Forest, he's just great all around. He's always good in whatever I've seen him in, and I'm always happy to see him show up in a movie. He doesn't have a ton of time on screen, but he does well with what he has to work with.

Stu talks to his wife while hookers bang on the phone booth door

Something I found interesting with how Phone Booth is made, is in how they display and feed you information. So many times in this movie, they'll have a picture-in-picture display. You can see an example of it in the image above. But they do this in more than just that way. It could be that the screen is divided into 2 large sections, or I think there were even 3 or more images sometimes. It was a weird way of showing the image, and it wasn't used very artfully either. It was just sorta slapped onto the screen. But I can understand that they wanted to have the camera at the phone booth as much as possible so you felt like you can't leave either.

Phone Booth ended up being an alright movie. It didn't blow me away, but it was decent. It definitely got better as it went. If anything, this has just made me more curious to see the movie Buried starring Ryan Reynolds in which the entire film takes place with him in a coffin, buried alive. If I thought Phone Booth was limited in what it could show, I can't want to see what it's like in Buried.