The simple premise of this film hearkens back to Hitchcock’s Lifeboat and Rear Window, with a touch of the gritty New York-quality of Joseph Sargent’s The Taking of Pelham One Two Three. Enjoying this movie depends a lot on how willing you are to buy the premise, and how good they are at selling it.

They were good enough, and I bought. The setup is well thought out, giving reason for things to get started, and once it gets going, it’s mostly plausible enough. The performances help a lot in this regard—Colin Farrell takes his character from unrepentant jerk to terrified supplicant in a convincing arc, and Forest Whittaker takes a limited role and fills it out. Kiefer Sutherland’s sniper plays pretty well off of Farrell’s desperate publicist, especially when you consider almost all of his work was done post-production. Katie Holmes and Radha Mitchell are given little to do, and frankly do little more than not get in the way.

Schumacher does err in taking the film out of the phone booth a little too often, but in general he manages to keep the tension ratcheted up. There are some pretty silly bits (my favorite was the chalk outline—when was this done exactly?), but they are minor enough. The ending is perhaps a bit too clever by half (and has its own implausibility), but the fun of this movie is getting there, anyway.