Saw Phone Booth with Race recently, and I have to say that it pretty much kept me on the edge of my seat, not unlike Donald Kaufman’s psychologically taut The Three. And since it takes place in real time and stars Kiefer Sutherland, it’s sort of like a lost episode of 24 where the main character goes nuts and starts firing into a crowd.

My one problem with Phone Booth was that it was a total ripoff of Snipe Master IV: Target of Death, which was, let’s face it, not even the best chapter in the Snipe Master saga. Basically if you look at it closely it’s just one big homage to the whole Snipe Master series. The parallels are obvious, but let’s list a couple.

First, you’ve got the most blatant one: a guy in a confined space who can’t move because a sniper is playing cat and mouse with him. This is pretty much exactly the premise of the dream sequence in Target of Death, except instead of a glass elevator in a fancy hotel you’ve got Colin Farrell trapped in a phone booth talking on the telephone. At least in Snipe Master IV it made sense why that particular character got targeted for sniping, because the bad guy was Snipe Master’s twin brother, and he was trying to prove he could out-snipe him.

One difference is that in Phone Booth the bad guy wasn’t hiding in a suitcase the whole time, being moved inconspicuously around the hotel lobby throughout the movie so that the cops couldn’t get a fix on his position. I thought this was a clever idea.

Second, one thing I definitely liked in Phone Booth was the supporting characters. For instance, there were some prostitutes and a pimp that were trying to get Colin Farrell out of the phone booth, and in Snipe Master IV there was Pregnant Lady who was having a baby, and she wanted to get off to go to the hospital, but Snipe Master’s twin brother wouldn’t let him let her off, so Snipe Master had to deliver the baby himself. I think Phone Booth would have stolen this, too, if they could have figured out a way to get a pregnant lady in the phone booth with Colin Farrell.

Another good supporting actor was Forrest Whittaker, who played a cop who was trying to keep the situation under control and get to the bottom of the mystery. His character was definitely an homage to the cop Brian Dennehy played in Snipe Master II: Targeted for Dying, who somehow gets caught up in Snipe Master’s quest to get the guys who kidnapped his daughter. Remember the final showdown in the circus tent? Very similar to the way Phone Booth ended, though I do not want to give anything away.

A big difference between the Snipe Master series and Phone Booth is that in the latter, Colin Farrell’s character is basically a bad person who is being judged by the sniper. As we learned in the original 1979 Snipe Master movie, Snipe Master (We do not learn his name until Snipe Master III: Expand on Impact) was an elite special forces sniper who came back from Vietnam to find that his wife was killed by the mob, so he decides to use his special skills (sniping people) to get revenge and bring some justice to a land filled with hippies and sex perverts (the movie had a radically conservative social stance due to director Dale Mason’s personal politics).

Anyway, in the end he became un-hypnotized and ended up saving the president, so he might even be called a hero, although this is a particularly hot topic for debate among Snipe Master fans.

This is not the point, though. The point is that while I commend Phone Booth for its choice of… shall we say, “inspiration”, it could have stood to be a little more original. You can use a premise from another movie and still be innovative. For instance, Godfather II used the premise from Godfather I, but director Francis Ford Coppolla definitely chose to add his personal creativity rather than just trying to copy the original. I urge the producers of Phone Booth to keep this in mind for when they make the sequel, Phone Booth II.