‘Phone Booth’ moralizing rings false

Written by exploitation king Larry Cohen and directed by Joel Schumacher, a longtime purveyor of slightly more rarefied pulp (“The Lost Boys,” “8MM”), the new thriller “Phone Booth” stars Colin Farrell, one of those young men about town who’s been up-and-coming for the last five years. Outfitted in designer threads and sporting a Bronx accent by way of Dublin, Farrell enters in full swagger as Stu Shepard, a public relations smoothie cut from the same sharkskin cloth as Tony Curtis in “Sweet Smell of Success.”

Stu is married to a stolid blond (Radha Mitchell) but longs for a spunky brunet (Katie Holmes), an actress whom he regularly calls from the last standing phone booth in Manhattan. (Why the booth? His wife checks his cell phone bills.) After cruising the neighborhood with a quaking assistant in tow, Stu slows down on a colorfully sordid stretch of Times Square that Giuliani and Disney forgot. He dismisses the help, then slips into the phone booth where he blithely slips off his wedding band.

This is no ordinary hustler, no mere Sammy Glick with a Rolex and a subscription to Maxim. This guy’s a cad. Ambition and adulterous fantasies have shaped his personality and, as is often the case with movies like these, marked him for punishment. Which is why, for reasons that have nothing to do with movie logic and everything to do with movie morality, Stu becomes a phone booth captive shortly after he does what every sane New Yorker knows not to do from birth: He answers a public telephone.

The party at the other end of the line turns out to be a crack sniper and full-blown psycho (Kiefer Sutherland, purring like an FM disc jockey) who has decided to use Stu for target practice. Hang up, the sniper warns Stu, and your number is up. Although he’s initially incredulous, Stu wises up to the guy once he starts squeezing off rounds. Shots are fired and Plexiglas shattered, a semi-innocent goes down, pandemonium descends and Forest Whitaker ambles out as a detective recovering from past disgrace. Farrell, meanwhile, enthusiastically seizes his moment to run through the Stanislavsky playbook from front to back -- shouting, sobbing, yelling, mewling, weeping, growling and gesticulating with the wildness of a man in trouble and an actor in clover.

Without question, the whole thing’s absurd -- this is, remember, about a guy stuck in a phone booth -- but for its first 40 minutes or so it’s also mildly entertaining, fueled by the nuttiness of the setup and Schumacher’s energy. The story takes off like a shot, and, even when its characters are on hold, the filmmaking remains as jazzed as one of Stu’s Times Square walkabouts. If the whole thing flags, then dive-bombs at the midway point, it’s not because Farrell and Schumacher aren’t trying hard, but because the filmmakers struggle to wedge in some meaning where none belongs. The psycho sniper hasn’t just picked out Stu randomly but has picked him out for censure and some very tedious moralizing. Exit a tense little thriller; enter condemnation, confession and contrition.

In Cohen’s 1982 horror classic “Q,” a giant bird that’s taken to roosting in the Chrysler Building swoops down to make hash of New Yorkers who have foolishly taken to rooftop sunbathing, sometimes in the picturesque nude. “Q” (short for quetzalcoatl) is a masterpiece of lowbrow, low-budget ingenuity -- a model of grind-house madness. Cohen is the sort of opportunistic visionary who, after looking at one too many religious paintings, once made a movie about a rampaging messiah; until “Phone Booth,” he was most notorious for his movies about rampaging babies.

He came up with the idea for a guy trapped in a booth some 30 years ago during a lunch with Alfred Hitchcock, but it was only after the director’s death that he solved the puzzle of why the caller can’t leave. Cohen cleared the story’s crucial logistical obstacle, but from the evidence of the final “Phone Booth,” he never did figure out why anyone should care whether Stu gets out.

Up to a point that’s a screenwriter’s problem, but when a small idea like this one gets pumped up -- given a big enough budget, special effects and a major send-off -- it also becomes a problem for the director, who then has to justify the inflation. It’s a matter of routine now that many of the bigger releases are pricey B-movies, which in itself is no big deal: Some of the finest movies ever made were B-movies. The trick is that the very best Bs make a virtue of their humble origins, and, as everyone knows, in the big-movie business, “humble” is always a four-letter word.