Phone Booth

Joel Schumacher's Phone Booth , starring Colin Farrell, whose release was postponed during the Beltway Sniper terror, is being sniped at itself by many critics. Calling it this clanking, overheated thriller, Stephen Holden in the New York Times concludes Phone Booth is bogus on every level, right down to its half-hearted trick ending. John Anderson in Newsday says it's the kind of film that can be told in 15 words or less, in this case: man answers pay phone and is told if he hangs up, he's dead. However, Anderson observes: The first thing you don't do, if you're going to make a film like this, is put a guy on the victim end of the phone whom the audience wouldn't mind seeing blown to Kingdom Come. To Michael Sragow of the Baltimore Sun, the only question raised by the movie is How many bad undergraduate ideas can you stuff in a phone booth? The movie does have its defenders. Joe Morgenstern in the Wall Street Journal says it delivers the goods with signal success. Stephen Hunter in the Washington Post calls it really more a gimmick than a movie, but it hammers you flat the whole way through. And Mark Caro in the Chicago Tribune says that it is a lean, mean tension machine, setting up its premise, executing it with smarts, throwing in enough twists to keep things interesting, and wrapping it up before anyone can get fatigued or reflective. It's on the money.

Good Movie to watch once or maybe twice