Film Summary CCXLVIII (Phone Booth)



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Colin Farrell the middle of the road actor, you know who he is when you see him but he doesn't generally take you out of a movie with his stage presence not likes Will Ferrell, Jack Black, George Clooney or Keanu Reeves.
And he dose all right here, he has to play a sleazebag who eventually breaks down due to hyper stress.
Anybody else think that that Colin Farrell looks like a half-breed between George Clooney and Spencer Nolan Rice (of Kenny vs Spenny Fame.) As Seen lift

The story itself is quite simple, a man who's a pathological liar goes into a phone booth to call his mistress and ends up talking to a mysterious man on the phone that tells him that if he leaves the booth he'll die. Then other people died while trying to take him out of the booth, the situation escalates, the police get involved, eventually he'll negotiate his way out, survive the encounter and the gun man will theoretically die.

I remember going to the theater with my aunt to see this movie. 
Neither of us had any idea what this film was, I think we thought it was an action movie Something in the PG-13 Market. Turns out it wasn't, the guy spent 90% of the movie in the bow phone booth and swore about a hundred times. We ended up walking out of the film about 30 minutes in originally. Which painted is view in my head that this was actually a really bad movie.
Now re-watching it 15 years later I can say that it's a perfectly serviceable film. It doesn't get boring at any point but it doesn't overly excite you either, it's a good background movie you don't need to keep up with the story to know what's going on because it's so simplistic.

It's a joe Schumacher movie see you never know what you're going to get if.. Schumacher's always had a bit of a checkered history with films. Making everything from ''Falling-down'' to Batman and Robin. He has a variety to be sure. I'd say he does a pretty good job here, his sound editing is interesting enough especially considering that the shooter comes in better than anyone else. His camera Works a bit weird though: Lots of low swooping shots and zoom outs of big buildings (which to make sense where it needs to be). But then he's got these weird scenes where tiny screen will pop up while the main action is going on indicating something else, and you can't really pay attention to it especially if you're in a dialogue-heavy scene which is 85% of the movie.
About halfway through the movie these little screens don't pop up anymore. Instead being replaced by the far more interesting and more sensible. ''through the scope'' view point. As we get to see what the shooter himself is looking at.
I wonder if the people who made taken got their influence from this. Because the shooter on the telephone who's played by Kiefer Sutherland sounds almost exactly the same to Liam Neeson's character in Taken , except that their roles are reversed which is kind of fun to think about. Now I'd like to see a movie we're Liam Neeson and has to go up against Kiefer Sutherland.

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