Phone Booth (15)

Your number's up

Critics often resort to the line about how inside the overlong, overstuffed, undisciplined hunk of trash under review there is a good, tight little movie trying to get out. Well, here's a surprise: Joel Schumacher, a director who specialises in the first kind of movie – Batman & Robin, 8mm, Bad Company – has gone and made a tip-top version of the second. Phone Booth, lasting 81 minutes, is mean, lean and nimble as a pickpocket's fingers. It has its shortcomings, mainly in the plausibility department, but in terms of delivering thrills it knocks the spots off recent competition.

That includes the CIA thriller The Recruit, which happens to share its star, the suddenly ubiquitous Colin Farrell. The Irish-born actor got his big break when Schumacher cast him as the lead in the Vietnam drama Tigerland, and perhaps there's something in their chemistry together because both men excel themselves again. Farrell plays Stu Shepard, a New York publicity agent who's slippery even by the standards of his breed; brandishing two cellphones like six-guns, he wheels and deals, lying to clients, blagging free lunches, pimping for magazine covers and generally doing a fine impersonation of a louse. He's the natural heir to Tony Curtis's sleazeball press agent – "a cookie full of arsenic" – in Sweet Smell of Success, and he loves every New York minute of it.

Of course, anyone in movies having this high a time is bound to be heading for a fall, and sure enough a banana skin waits around the corner for Stu. Having just failed to lure a pretty wannabe actress (Katie Holmes) into his clutches, he cradles the receiver in the phone booth where he's called her from (he doesn't want her number showing up on his cellphone bill). The phone rings again, Stu for no good reason picks it up, and his nightmare begins. On the line is a voice he doesn't know, but the voice seems to know all about him. "You're going to learn to obey me," the caller says. At first Stu is incredulous, then irritated – why shouldn't he just hang up? Because, as the voice explains, he has a high-velocity rifle with telescopic sights trained on him right now, and if he moves from that phone booth he's a dead man. Yikes! And just to let him know what he's up against, The Caller (as he's named in the credits) shoots a beefy thug who was trying to force Stu out of the phone booth. One down. Who's next?

Schumacher gets real mileage out of this simple scenario, keeping his camera tight on a tatty stretch of Eighth Avenue and splitting the screen once the plot starts to ramify. The texture of grungy-end Manhattan is felt in the trio of streetwalkers who screech abuse at Stu for hogging the phone booth: Macbeth had an easier ride from the three witches. Matthew Libatique's photography darts nervily around the tall city buildings, as if trying to fix on the sniper's angle of attack, but the windows gaze back as blank as the eyes of a skull. Paranoia leaks into the atmosphere like steam off a grate. But the picture is more fun than this suggests, thanks largely to a sly, sardonic script by B-movie meister Larry Cohen. There's something amusingly pathetic about Stu's attempts to wriggle out of his tight corner by appeasing the caller's vanity: he assumes the man is a "failed actor" or "prick intern" he once gave the boot to and now must make amends by promising a book deal or a TV appearance.

The caller's face we don't see, but the voice is instantly familiar (let's keep it a surprise) and the way it mocks Stu's desperate attempts to bargain is scary-funny. When the cops show up, led by Forest Whitaker in cuddly bear mode, and the TV cameras nose in, it seems things can get no worse for the stranded Stu, but they do. The caller spots in the milling crowds the actress Stu has been trying to "promote", and suggests, with hideous ambiguity: "I think she could use a new head-shot." Down the line Stu hears the clunk of a rifle being cocked. The caller, apparently a godlike avenger, has previously executed a German porn king and a corrupt financier, but what could a publicity agent have done that's so terrible? According to the voice, he is guilty of "avoidance and deception", and of "inhumanity", and we begin to wonder what he knows about Stu that we don't.

A full accounting of his crimes emerges in a humiliating public confession to his confused and terrified wife (Radha Mitchell). Stu, by now in tears, admits he is a liar and a fraud – even his gold Rolex is a fake, "just like I am". He's rude, he's a bully, and he's never been nice to anyone who couldn't do something for him. And he thought about cheating on his wife a few times. Whoa, hang on there. He thought about cheating on her? Sorry, but not even a PR deserves to be hunted down for mere contemplation of an infidelity. It's a weakness in Cohen's screenplay that Stu, for all his superficial unpleasantness, is actually a plain old human being. How much more intriguing if he'd really been guilty of something, like murder (the PR's favourite method would probably be pestering somebody to death). The prankster with the rifle might be on to something with his porn barons and financial swindlers, but surely a relative innocent like Stu would be beneath his notice.

Life suggests otherwise. Phone Booth, due for release last autumn, was pulled when American citizens were suddenly under fire in the Washington, DC area, and random victims of a sniper lay dead in gas-station forecourts. Six months on, the distributors deem it OK to show the film – I guess the world is so much safer now, isn't it?