Rewind Files: Phone Booth is the Most 2003 Movie of All Time

Rewind Files is when we take a second look at a piece of media to gain a better sense of its greatness, its awfulness, or its place in the cultural landscape. 

“Alright dude, look: The studio’s on thin ice. We need one movie to save the company, so give us your best shot.”

“Okay. You guys ready for this? I can explain the whole thing in one sentence.”

“Just one sentence to contain an entire movie plot? I have to admit, I’m already dubious.”

“Just you wait. Okay, here goes—wait, are you ready?”

“Yeah.”

“Okay. Here it is: A guy walks into a phone booth where he receives a call from a sniper/serial killer saying if the guy leaves the phone booth or disobeys any of his instructions he’s gonna be shot and killed right there on the streets of New York City.”

[short pause] “Who’s involved?”

“Colin Farrell. Katie Holmes. Forest Whitaker. Kiefer Sutherland.”

“Does the sniper ever fire his weapon?”

“Yes. Multiple times.”

[The executive glances around the room. Then, with trembling fingers, he slowly reaches up and takes off his glasses and brings them down onto the table. He looks at the pitchman.] “That’s the single greatest idea I’ve ever heard. Excuse me, what did you say your name was again?”

[The pitchman, halfway out the door, looks back over his shoulder.] “Barry.”

“Barry what?”

“Barry Obama.”

***

It’s fun to imagine the pitch meeting for certain movies, and Phone Booth is the perfect example. The plot our friend Barry explains up there? That’s the exact plot of the movie, and those actors are exactly who’s in it. Colin Farrell a solid decade before he started trying. Pre-Cruise Katie Holmes. Pre-Oscar Forest Whitaker. Prime-24 Kiefer. It runs about 1 hour and 15 minutes and Colin’s in the phone booth for about 1 hour and 1 minute. It’s great.

Phone Booth came out in 2003, but even if you didn’t know that beforehand you’d still be able to guess, because Phone Booth is awash in a very specific 2003 kind of smell. The title appears after we see a CGI’d satellite zoom by over the sound of a million people dialing phones, then the camera turns onto a CGI’d Earth and we’re sucked all the way down to New York City, which appears out of a circuit board-esque kind of graphic thing made to look like the inside of a Motorola flip phone. Beepy music plays. There’s lots of whooshes and zaps. The credit-font looks like the numbers on a digital clock, but with letters. The year 2003 is almost 15 years ago (!), and that reminder makes re-watching Phone Booth one of the most unique second viewings you might have in 2017. It’s so dated it reminds you of your modern perspective. It’s a way deeper dynamic than the movie should be able to achieve.

Here, this is how the movie opens: A voiceover kicks things off by saying that in 2003, 8 million people lived in New York City (it’s about 8.5 million today), 3 million of them used “cellular phones” (today, it’s just over 8 million—95-percent of the city). and 2 million people still used pay phones (right now, the city’s actually replacing all its pay phones with free public Wifi hotspots) Right off the bat, you know you’re in for a movie that operates on a premise that is quite literally no longer possible. Things only become stranger from there.

As Phone Booth progresses, it leans on 2003’s weird in-between of technological innovation. Colin Farrell plays a rich douchebag in the movie, so he has a cell phone, but the whole time he’s also hamstrung by the corded pay phone. If he exits the booth or hangs up, he’ll be killed, so the box kind of holds a ball-and-chain function that just can’t be replicated anymore. Our phones work everywhere. Think of one of the classic horror-movie groaners: the no-service cellphone. Why does that drive us crazy? Because our phones almost always have service.

If a movie nowadays wants to do the same sort of untraditional-prison thriller that Phone Booth pulls off, it has to be much more creative. A good example is Buried from 2010, which we’ve written about before. That movie can be shallowly described as “Phone Booth in a coffin.” Ryan Reynolds wakes up in a wooden box, six feet underground, and has to try and figure out how he came to be there and how to escape. It’s a great movie, and it has some rather slick solutions for its modern freedoms (Ryan’s predicament makes for a perpetually weak cell signal, for example, and the phone’s constant search for coverage means it drains battery much faster—ironically that’s not a problem in Phone Booth because everything in that movie draws power from an external source—weird).

As our world becomes more convenient and more connected, it becomes a question as to how movies like Phone Booth can continue to exist. Problem-solving for modern characters is easier, but problem-creation for movie writers is a lot harder. There’s more escape routes and loopholes. Some movies do a tight job of battening down the hatches, like February’s Get Out, where the baddies keep unplugging our hero’s phone and the cell cameras escalate the tension, but those are exceptions. Most plots find blunt ways to make things easier on the writers—a remote cabin in the woods means no service, or an encrypted file means no access—and it’s worth wondering if we’ll see more period flicks like this year’s hippie-themed shooter Free Fire, which seemed to take place in the past for the sole purpose of eliminating modern solutions. Sooner or later, that’s going to stop being fun and retro and it’s going to start feeling cheap, like a cop-out.

On the other hand, we might see more movies try a hyper-technical approach, like this spring’s Fate of the Furious. That movie has a villain called Cypher (yep) who says the words “Hack ‘em all” (yep) and takes control of an entire city’s worth of vehicles to wreak havoc (yep). There are going to be lots of movies that will try to skirt the technology problem by making technology the problem. If our heroes can’t trust it, they won’t be able to use it. Got ‘em.

That’s the rabbit hole Phone Booth sends you on. It’s a fun thought experiment. For now, we can keep watching dumb hacker movies and forced period flicks and accept them as good-enough popcorn munchers, but it seems inevitablethat before long we’ll start demanding things more like Get Out or Unfriended or the early Bourne movies, where technology wasn’t seen as an obstacle in the writer’s room, but rather an avenue for thrills, suspense, and possibility. Our phones have made us dumber in a lot of ways, but they’ve also made us savvier. That will change the way we watch movies, even though it’ll still be great to go back to something like Phone Booth, where ignorance really is bliss.