Review – Phone Booth

Of all the movies that take place almost entirely inside a phone booth, this is probably the best. Colin Ferrell plays a small-time hustler who gets pinned in the title location by a sniper who keeps him on the phone, ordering him to confess his various shortcomings to the cops, his wife, and just about anyone else who happens to be standing around. Overall the story is entertaining enough, but at several points throughout the picture the drama switches from tense to downright annoying. And our hero’s being punished only for fairly venial sins (sure he’s a creep, but it’s not like he killed anyone), I suppose in part to make him more sympathetic and in part to make the sniper seem more crazy and evil. However, somehow the relatively trivial nature of the protagonist’s “crimes” makes him seem silly and pathetic, scarcely worth the time of a skilled psychopath. Mildly amusing