Phone Booth (5 Stars)

"This is my booth, and I'm not coming out, all right? I like it in the booth. It's my world".

This film was made in 2003. Phone booths were already in decline, because of the convenience of mobile phones. The film states that the phone booth on 53rd and 8th is the last booth of its type in western Manhattan. How many are there now, in America and elsewhere?

This is a phone booth in Coventry Road, Small Heath, Birmingham, just outside Asda. It provides an essential service. It's used by drug addicts on Friday morning, just after midnight. That's when they receive their weekly welfare benefits. They don't want phone numbers to be stored on their mobile phones, so they ring drug dealers from this phone booth. The business itself is done in front of Asda. The dealers pull up in front of the cash machines, and the money changes hands through the car window. It's all very efficient. As a habitual midnight shopper I observed it many times. It's all made possible by the phone booth.

I watched this film today in remembrance of the director Joel Schumacher, who died yesterday at the age of 80. Most newspaper reports refer to him as "the Batman director", because he made two films about Batman in the 1990's. That's a shame, because they're not his best films (though they're not as bad as some critics say). He attempted to imitate the camp films of Tim Burton, but as I'm sure he later realised, there's only one Tim Burton. The films would have been better if he'd made them in his own action style. I'm not saying that the films should have been darker, I'm just saying they should have been more serious, though remaining the over-the-top action. The Batman films should have been more like "Falling Down", which he made two years before "Batman Forever".

"Phone Booth" has a lot in common with "Falling Down", as far as the style goes. It's a man pushed to the limit by forces working against him. The difference is that in "Falling Down" Bill Foster rises from the chaos to become an anti-hero, whereas Stu Shephard collapses under the pressure and becomes a nervous wreck.

The premise of "Phone Booth" might seem infeasible, a man being held hostage in a phone booth by an unseen sniper, but the action is so intense that the viewer soon stops asking questions.

It's a brilliant film. I only intended to watch one of Joel Schumacher's films this week, but after watching "Phone Booth" today I need more of his action; I'll watch "Falling Down" in the next few days. The Blu-ray disc is already lying on the desk next to my computer.

Success Rate:  + 5.5

	Order from Amazon.com
	Order from Amazon.co.uk
	Order from Amazon.de

Strangely, the film has only been released on DVD in England. If you're a high definition film fan, don't worry. The German Blu-ray is 100% English.