A sniper is on the loose in Phone Booth.
The ads for Phone Booth, a thriller about a sniper menacing a stretch of 8th Ave., make it look like a modern cousin of Dog Day Afternoon?a New York carnival composed of equal parts media fascination and panic in the streets. I can't imagine any moviegoer expecting Phone Booth director Joel Schumacher and writer Larry Cohen to come out with a movie as good (or relevant) as Dog Day. But considering the touchy subject matter, you'd think the result might be connected to real fears, real violence, real life. (The picture was slated for release during the D.C. sniper's reign of terror, but was hastily postponed.)
Predictably, though, Phone Booth turns out to be a contrived, unreal melodrama that deploys "realistic" touches (including densely layered street sounds and superb handheld photography by Matthew Libatique) to sell yet another tired story of a selfish media professional's need for personal growth. (Given the nature of the story, it's also a rare motion picture in which almost every performance, good and bad, can be described as having been phoned in.)
The hero is a shark-like PR wizard and straying husband named Stu (Irish actor Colin Farrell), a classic Big Apple wiseass. Stu is introduced striding through Times Square yammering orders to his young unpaid assistant. Stu is feared, not liked. A restaurant owner harangues him on the street about consuming six months' worth of unpaid food and drink in exchange for one measly gossip column mention. (It must have been in Page Six of the New York Post, which the film repeatedly mentions; the Post is a corporate cousin of 20th Century Fox, the company that released Phone Booth.) A beat cop who accepts complimentary Britney Spears tickets from Stu declares, "Stuey, you put the 'ho' in show business."
Soon after, Stu dodges real hoze on 8th Ave. while making a phone booth call to his favorite starlet client (Katie Holmes), then finds himself coping with a deranged sniper who interrogates him over the phone and appears to have bugged the booth as well (Kiefer Sutherland, sounding like Sideshow Bob on The Simpsons). The sniper won't let Stu leave until Stu has fulfilled his as-yet-unexplained evil plan, which apparently requires Stu to confess every sin in his life and make amends under threat of murder.
Schumacher is a relatively artless director, but he knows a thing or two about tension. He and Cohen, an exploitation film veteran whose credits include It's Alive, Q and Original Gangstas, put the screws to the audience, hitting Stu with one unwanted bit of stimuli after another: streetwalkers pounding on the glass demanding to use the phone for business; the streetwalkers' outraged pimp; a crowd of witnesses and cops, led by Forest Whitaker's likeable negotiator; the sniper himself, who won't stand down until Stu airs his dirty laundry in public.
Like Schumacher's 8MM, A Time to Kill and Falling Down, Phone Booth is a handsomely produced, reasonably involving Hollywood movie that never comes within 10 miles of elegance, and that might make some viewers feel nauseous and soiled. The whole thing feels hollow and contrived?rhetorically deck-stacked, so that Schumacher and Cohen can make cynical but simpleminded points about the ruthlessness and stupidity of modern life. Phone Booth draws a line linking Stu, who's basically a media pimp, and the pimp on 8th Ave. overseeing the hookers who keep interrupting Stu's life-or-death phone call. It presents New York as the media center of the world, or the ninth plane of hell, or maybe (interchangeably) both. The opening montage shows an armada of New Yorkers talking into cell phones while video billboards and neon tickers light up the cityscape behind and above them. A disembodied third-person narrator reminds us that walking down the street while talking to an unseen person used to be considered evidence of insanity. Phone Booth suggests the ominpresence of the media and the communications industry is either proof of society-wide madness or the cause of it.
What's really interesting, though, is that here, as elsewhere in Schumacher's filmmaking career, he falsifies life in order to condemn it. Falling Down was an ambitious botch that wanted to be a modern Taxi Driver, but instead amounted to a list of stuff that annoyed screenwriter Ebbe Roe Smith, indiscriminately presented by Schumacher as equally worthy of our outrage. (That favorite liberal Hollywood hobgoblin, the racist white supremacist with a bunker full of weapons, was dusted off one more time, and inexplicably treated with the same level of disdain as fast-food clerks who wouldn't sell the hero a breakfast sandwich after breakfast hours.) The far-more repulsive 8MM compounded a huge falsehood with a smaller one, sending its detective hero to solve the on-camera murder of a young runaway (there's never been any credible evidence that snuff films actually exist) by investigating a wholly fictitious red-light district of Los Angeles that was constructed by the elves in Schumacher's art department.
Phone Booth feels just as fake and misguided. The film should have been a meaningful pop horror film about the anonymity and violence of modern urban life. But it feels more like a pointless vendetta against the media and the PR industry that feeds the media. Stu is a nasty character, but Phone Booth's suggestion that he deserves his punishment is bizarre. Rather than implying the filmmakers are morally outraged about the entertainment industry's ingrained dishonesty and meanness, it suggests they've been living in a showbiz bubble for so long that they have lost all sense of perspective. Phone Booth's hilariously insular outlook reminded me of a story a friend from New York told me about taking an acting class in Hollywood. The teacher asked the class to create and inhabit a regular working person. My friend's idea of a regular working person was a cop, a teacher or a deli owner; he was a bit surprised when his classmates assumed it meant key grips, casting agents, assistant cameramen and makeup artists.
The sniper's identity remains a mystery until the end, and he claims to have killed two other supposedly deserving parties: a pedophile-porn producer and a crooked Wall Street bigwig. But he initially claims to be a failed actor who's still smarting because Stu disrespected him, and when the sniper briefly describes his failed acting career, his hatred of Stu and anybody who resembles Stu comes across as so pointed and personal that the filmmakers just might be settling personal scores they'd rather not explain. I was less interested in the drama onscreen than in finding out what sins a publicist had to commit against a screenwriter or director to inspire a movie like Phone Booth, which decries PR agents as more repulsive than mass murderers.
Phone Booth's hero gets trapped, humiliated, manipulated and nearly shot dead by a rifle-toting maniac while the world watches on live tv, and the movie conjures no specific emotion toward any of it?save for a distanced, vaguely sardonic amusement at the thought of a rich scumbag publicist finally being put in a situation he can't control, and forced to atone for his sins. "Don't be a publicist!" the menaced Stu cries out to his assistant, while the sniper looks on. "You're too good for it!" I never figured Schumacher would direct a message picture, but there you have it.