Hanging on the line

Joel Schumacher's little thriller proposes the ingenious notion that, in certain circumstances, a phone box can become a public confessional. The circumstances in which Colin Farrell finds himself cornered in one, forced to confess his sins of cheapness, infidelity and power-dressing, are piquant.

Why should anyone in this cellphone age use a New York pay phone? Because calls aren't charged on the bill that the wife might open.

So Farrell's Stu Shepard, a creep whose job as a publicist is lying to (and for) his clients, enters the phone box, slipping off his wedding ring, to call his mistress. At that moment, an unseen assassin (voiced by Kiefer Sutherland) with a priestly line in moral chastisement, and an even clearer sight-line on Stu's vital parts, cuts in on his call to tell him he's one dead man if he steps out of the booth.

Just to show that he means it, the marksman fatally plugs the neighbourhood pimp who is about to beat Stu's brains out for keeping his girls from taking their clients' calls.

Held up for many months following last year's spate of random killings in the US by a psychotic sniper, Phone Booth is an exercise in public humiliation as well as an effective suspense tease.

Stu's multiple guilts about his marriage, job and self-worth are extruded from his sweaty persona as crowds gather, the police confab, and the killer dominates, intimidates, insinuates and makes his victim look death in the eye, or rather in the little red rifle-laser spot that wanders lecherously over Stu's anatomy. Forest Whitaker plays the cop in charge who undergoes some moral epiphanies of his own.

Phone Booth gets under your skin, despite the overload of tricks, twists, technical gimmicks and last-minute surprise that Schumacher employs to quicken the adrenaline and boost the running time - Hitchcock would have polished it off in half-an-hour on TV. Farrell convincingly turns himself from cocky flack to limp rag.

It's a showcase performance.

Phone Booth
Cert: cert15