For maybe the first five minutes of Joel Schumacher's new thriller Phone Booth we follow Stu Shepard (Colin Farrell), a hustling young publicist, as he walks west through Times Square making cell phone calls to editors and columnists and clients trying to get print space and arrange a party. At the bottom of the game, Stu is desperate, but he doesn't plead, he pushes--playing one magazine off another when he doesn't have interest from either, trying to recall an item he faxed to a columnist in order to pique her interest in it. Already an inveterate multi-tasker, he isn't just working by phone--he hands concert tickets to a cop in return for celebrity tidbits he feeds to the columnist in exchange for space, and we see him pull the same thing in person on a hotel manager that he pulled on the editors by phone.

Stu is trailed by a young, unpaid assistant, who also has a cell; they use their phones in coordination like players in a furious duet. The relationship works in part because Stu alternately promises to teach the eager kid everything he'll need to know about p.r. (and to pay him) and threatens to replace him if he can't keep up. Both approaches make Stu seem like a barely attainable ideal--as a matter of largesse he gives the kid cash to buy a slick suit like the one Stu is wearing. (This common kind of entertainment industry S/M relationship is the subject of George Huang's terrific black comedy Swimming with Sharks (1995), with Kevin Spacey abusing Frank Whalley. In Huang's picture we see what living up to the boss's demands does to the kid in the long run.)

Schumacher started out in the fashion business in New York thirty-odd years ago and has worked in movies since the mid-'70s. A lot of experience informs this opening, which is like a condensed version of Alexander Mackendrick's classic Sweet Smell of Success (1957), starring Tony Curtis as the press agent Sidney Falco, scrambling to stay in good with the fearsome columnist-god, J.J. Hunsecker, played by Burt Lancaster and modeled on Walter Winchell. Both movies create an atmosphere out of the sweat of parasitic operators on the margins of the entertainment world and manage to keep their self-loathing sharp enough to slice fine, avoiding self-pity. That describes most of the running length of Sweet Smell of Success, however, but only the first five or ten minutes of Phone Booth.

Stu is heading to a phone booth on Eighth Avenue--the last one on the street with a door that closes providing some privacy, we're told--where he takes off his wedding ring to smooth talk a young actress into meeting him at a hotel after she gets off her job at a restaurant. She turns him down and before he manages to leave the phone rings. It turns out to be a sniper with a laser-guided scope rifle trained on his chest who knows everything about him and is going to punish him for his dishonesty and nastiness--to his wife, the girl on the side, his assistant, his clients, random people he interacts with on the street, himself.