In Don’t hang up! from director Joel Schumacher you see The Penguin star Colin Farrell in a gripping thriller. The idea is as simple as it is ingenious: the entire film takes place in just one location and thus challenges the entire range of the main actor.
Don’t hang up! streams on Disney+.
That’s what the phone booth thriller on Disney+ is about
Joel Schumacher is dedicated to nothing less than the end of an era: the era of the telephone booth. When the cunning PR agent Stuart Shepard (Colin Farrell) once again contacts his affair Pamela McFadden (Katie Holmes) in the telephone booth, he suddenly receives a call. A man on the line greets him with the words:
Isn’t that funny? You hear a phone ringing, it could be anyone. And you have to answer a ringing phone, right?
Everyone knows this intrinsic compulsion to answer the phone when it rings. And that’s exactly what Don’t Hang Up! the gateway that forces the main character Shepard to no longer leave the telephone booth. Because the man on the line claims to be nearby and watching Shepard through the crosshairs of a sniper rifle. If Shepard leaves the phone booth, he’ll pull the trigger.
Stuart Shepard embodies everything that makes a so-called yuppie. The “young urban professional” Shepard – as the acronym Yuppie is spelled out – is fine with any means in his job. He lies, deceives and plays business partners against each other in order to achieve his goals. A merciless, completely amoral capitalist. Appropriately, he cheats on his wife Kelly (Radha Mitchell) with the younger Pamela. Although he has a cell phone, he uses the privacy of the phone booth so that Kelly doesn’t find out about his affair. And that is exactly what will be his downfall now.
The hopeless telephone booth is the core of this exciting thriller
The telephone booth was already slowly becoming extinct in its year of publication in 2002. Joel Schumacher honors this cultural relic with a fabulously exciting thriller. Don’t hang up! But it’s not just a tribute to the telephone booth. As in most chamber plays The main character goes through a lot of character development. The Guilty, Panic Room and Wheelman are just three of many other examples of how this claustrophobic sub-genre can be brilliantly implemented.
Shepard’s situation seems completely hopeless. In the midst of the anonymity of the big city of New York, he is completely on his own. Any wrong move could mean his death. What makes the film so incredibly exciting is not the physical movement, but the mental movement. How does he get out of this catastrophic nightmare?
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Like all representatives of this sub-genre, the main character has to come to terms with himself over the course of the film. In Don’t Hang Up! we get closer to the deeply unsympathetic city yuppie Shepard than we would wish. But doesn’t everyone deserve a second chance? Shepard is getting so worn down that I can’t help it. At the end of the film, I wish even this disgusting man a chance for a new beginning.
Lock it up, turn it on and keep it warm. In Don’t Hang Up! things are moving quickly. Definitely stay tuned, because Colin Farrell has to.