The movie takes place in a phone booth, more or less. There is an opening scene in which Stu walks through Times Square while lying to various people using various cell phones and alternately berates and butters up his unpaid assistant, but once the phone rings, the only scene that doesn't either contain the phone booth in the frame or is filmed from the perspective of the booth comes at the very end. In between are about 80 minutes of Colin Farell earning a spot on Inside The Actor's Studio, because this is acting.

In fact, each actor is perfect. Colin Farell is believable at every point in his character's progression, and the assistant is appropriately naive. The wife and the girlfriend have small roles, but perform them well. Forest Whitaker plays an interesting role as a cop evidently dealing with personal problems of his own. Those problems are only hinted at, and I almost wonder why they are. If the intent is to ratchet up the suspense, I didn't feel very ratcheted. If the intent is to set up that character for something later, that didn't really pay off either. I suppose the stakes were pretty high, but the sniper rifle seemed a bigger threat than that somehow Forest's personal issues would cause him to do something stupid.

Keifer did a great job as the sniper. He's got a creepy voice and makes a believable psychotic killer. When I consider that his voice and brief scenes were added later - much later - and that the role was originally filmed with someone else, I'm impressed with how well they managed to integrate his one appearance on screen with existing footage. I also wonder if the film would have been worth watching with someone else in the role. Probably.

Phone Booth - Fox (In Theaters)
Genre: Drama
Watchability: Very engaging, hard to stop watching
Philosophy: Very moral. Even infidelity not acted upon is worthy of judgement, and repentance must be utterly complete.
Suitability: It's an R-rated film mainly because of language, but it also contains violence and murder and shouting hookers.
Overall: 4/5

(This review also appears at W6 Daily.)