Picture this scene: A conference room, somewhere in Los Angeles, where a bunch of studio execs are listening to a guy pitch a movie about a slimeball Manhattan P.R. hustler dude who gets pinned down in a phone booth -- not a kiosk or a plastic bubble, an actual, old-school, glass-walled, accordion-door phone booth -- by a vengeful stalker with a long-range rifle. The way I figure it, at some point in the scene one of the execs leans forward and says, "Hang on. When is this movie happening, 1987? There are no phone booths left -- not in New York and probably not anywhere else. And doesn't this guy have, like, five cell phones? Unless he's dealing coke, he wouldn't be caught dead on a pay phone. Ha ha."

But nobody said that -- they were too busy imagining their co-workers in leather underwear, or wondering how much it was gonna cost to get the pool motor unclogged or whatever -- and so we have "Phone Booth," a movie that's laughable without, alas, even being enjoyably awful. It spends its first five minutes apologizing for its own existence: A voiceover narrator shows up to tell us that, hey, this is actually the very last phone booth in Manhattan, and Stu Shepard (Colin Farrell) is actually the very last guy who will ever use it. It's pretty much all downhill from there.