What an electrifying movie! When i read the preview, i wondered how in earth they were going to make a full lenght film with that kind of plot, but it worked splendidly. Probably going to be the greatest thriller of they year. Farrel and Whitaker were excecllent.
Stunning movie. Did anyone else think so? I honestly couldnt get up to take a leak and i really wanted to!
There’s a problem with this concept, maybe you can tell me if they addressed it.
I’m in the middle of a big city (so it appears in the ads), with tall buildings all around. Phone rings, I step in the booth and answer it, guy tells me he’ll kill me.
Naturally, I don’t believe him, so he explains that he’s a sniper in a high window with a scope-sighted rifle.
Being defiant by nature, and knowing that it’s rather hard to track an erratically moving target with a scope-sighted rifle, I cut off my reply in mid-word, bolt out of the booth, and run a random zig-zag across the street until I’m safely indoors.
Does the movie character even consider this option?
Meh.
I had my issues with the movie. I thought the majority of the characters were contrived stereotypical, contrived and completely uninteresting (The hookers, their pimp, the loving wife, the angry trigger happy cop).
I liked the pacing of the film, which was shockingly short. I also liked Forrest Whitaker’s work here. I would recommend it as a good rent, but I wouldn’t use the word “electrifying” unless i was gonna get paid for the quote to be used in a commercial.
“Electrifying”- New & Improved Scott, Some Paper
Yeah, kinda.
The sniper makes it really clear that if he makes a break for it, while he may get away, he will start killing people indescriminately. He also shoots a street vendor’s toy robot to proove that he can crack off a few shots without anyone noticing the gunshots.
The guy in the movie, though, is not defiant by nature. He’s the kind of guy who thinks he can talk his way out of anything. This is sort of important to the character, so having him try something daring like that wouldn’t have worked.
Although not an amazing movie, I liked Phone Booth. It was interesting, suspenseful, inventive with the idea of being trapped in a phone booth by a sniper, and enjoyable. Not a GREAT movie by any lengths, but enjoyable.
Although, throughout the movie, I couldn’t help but think it would have been better if Keifer Sutherland hadn’t replaced Ron Eldard. I think it would have been a better movie with Eldard as the sniper.
–greenphan
Blasphemy! If Jack errr Keifer wasn’t the voice in this movie, it would have flown completely under my radar.
This was my only complaint.
[spoiler]The sniper frames the pizza guy for the shootings and gets away. Wouldn’t Colin, having already talked to the pizza guy, realize that the voices were different?
I’m assuming that the appearance of the sniper to Colin in the ambulance would be written off as a drug-induced stupor.[/spoiler]
He talked to the pizza guy for only a minute and brushed him off. Why would he remember his voice?
An utterly forgetable movie.
And was the director actually trying to get the audience to question whether Sutherland’s actions were wrong or not? With the way the ending was handled (Sutherland opts not to kill Farrell since he fessed up to his wrongdoings), that’s the impression that I got.
I liked it, but mainly for the dry meta-joke the movie was making about movies. Namely that
…the sniper is a metaphor for the screenwriter of the typical action flick: he puts the hero in an absurd situation and demands that the hero show character development – or else! And, this being a movie, the hero does manage to successfully work through his Life Problem in a couple of hours, under massive pressure, and just in the nick of time. Just like the screenwriting seminar said he should.
The sniper’s list of bogus “explanations” – Viet Nam vet, etc.–seemed like a catalogue of stock screenwriter gimmicks for this sort of villain.
Taken this way, the end comments are morbidly funny – the other targets were unsuccessful “rough drafts” that didn’t quite work out and had to be thrown away.
The sniper’s voice was done really well in the movie. It seemed to be recorded in a soundless studio and was played in high fidelity. This was crucial in setting the mood, in part because the sniper had such a cool voice, but also because he had the most important dialogue, and it would have been disappointing to hear it as though filtered through a public phone. That is, we weren’t hearing exactly the same thing that Stu was hearing, so we can’t really guess what he knew or didn’t know about the man on the other end, based on his voice.
However, it was so dumb to suspect the pizza guy even for a second. I assumed that Stu was really out of it when he ID’d the guy, because if he’d thought about it, he would have realized it didn’t make sense. I also wish that they had introduced a few more characters in Act I so that we could guess at who the bad guy was.
This movie was just plain bad, i just watched it tonight and was appaled at the horrible acting of Forest Whittaker and especially the negotiator or whoever the white cop was. The only good thing was a cute Katie Holmes and Keifer Sutherlands voice.
By the way I am a Forrest Whitaker fan and this was about as bad as i have seen him, him being in it was the only reason I reneted it form the box at macdonalds
Ok, but
we never wondered who the bad guy was. I think is not a whodunit, but a well done thriller, to appraise its pacing.
And yes, it was a terrific voice. Excellent performing, specially when he laughed at Stu’s reactions. I surprised myself laughing at the same time as him.
I agree with New & Improved Scott in
“shockingly short”. I would have liked to be more difficult for Stu to solve the situation.
Btw,
I don’t understand the point of showing Kiefer Sutherland’s face in the ads and trying to deviate our attention to the pizza guy later.
All I know is, no more than two days after I saw Phone Booth, I heard Kiefer’s voice over an ad for some new phone company.
Mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm, that’s good irony.
I thought it was a pretty good movie. The cast definitely made it better then it would have been, but the length was just enough to where it didn’t drag on and on. Not Colin Farrells best work btw, which in my opinion was The Recruit.