"Would someone tell Schumacher that bullet hole is blocking my face?"

A crazed killer threatens to shoot a man if the phone booth he's in drops below 55 miles per hour!

No, not really. And while my flip intro may lead you to believe that Phone Booth is derivative, I actually found it to be a taut, original thriller.

The movie stars Colin Farrell as Stu Shepard, a smooth-talking, fast-walking, glad-handing publicist. We meet Stu as he swaggers his way through the teeming streets of New York City, eager assistant in tow, working the phone as he goes. He strokes his clients, manipulates the press, lies to everybody, and within a few minutes we dislike him intensely.

Enter the silky, yet menacing, disembodied voice of Kiefer Sutherland.

Stu steps into a phone booth, slips his wedding ring off his finger and dials a pretty young actress who he clearly wants for more than a client. After he hangs up, the phone rings and, like most of us would, Stu answers. The man on the other end knows him. The man on the other end can see him. The man on the other end threatens to shoot him with a high-powered rifle if he hangs up the phone. It seems he thinks our Stu has been a bad boy, and he's out to teach him a lesson in humility.

"Hang on, will ya, I'm on the line with Moviefone."

From there the movie is off and running. Screenwriter Larry Cohen does a great job of putting his character in a no-win situation, then giving him clever things to do on his own behalf. The script is smart and suspenseful and plays fair with the audience all the way through. Characters behave in ways that are not only intelligent but also believable in the context of the story, a quality that is all too rare these days. At a lean 80 minutes, the movie is exactly the right length and the story never feels either padded or shortchanged.

Director Joel Schumacher makes the most of his limited setting. We may spend most of the time looking at a guy in a phone booth, but Schumacher keeps it interesting. He heightens the tension with jittery camera work, fragmented screens and quick cuts to different angles. Sometimes we're in the booth with Stu, sometimes we see him through the glass, sometimes we hover above, all with the affect of helping us feel the terror that he feels, wonder, like him, where his tormenter is and what he will do next.  

"This sort of thing never happens on Dawson's Creek."

I'm also finally impressed with Farrell, an actor I usually find irritating. Stu takes a big journey from cocky to quivering to cathartic and Farrell pulls it off flawlessly. Credit also goes to Sutherland, whose honeyed voice drips with danger. If I were him I would totally be prank-calling all my friends this weekend.

Phone Booth is a brilliantly structured movie that both hooks you immediately with its high-tension premise and draws you in slowly as its details unfold. Thrillers don't come much better than that.

Gorilla Pants rating: 3.5 out of 4 bananas