...with its snare-drum-tight 75 minutes of actual image-on-screen and 72 minutes once you shave off the opening that tells us a bunch of useless factoids about phones in New York City. Those details didn't matter back in 2003, and they matter less now.

And at times its storytelling momentum is a little circuitous - the funny thing about the film is that the Caller tells Stu fairly quickly what he wants Stu to do, which is to confess his lustful heart and fake persona to his wife (Radha Mitchell) and his lover (Katie Holmes).

But the movie does put the pedal to the metal once it gets moving. Part of it is that Farrell's performance - one of his first really big showcases - carries a confident energy that slides smoothly into overactive panic and shame. His confession at the end of the film is around two minutes of him declaring every vice in his life, and the way his voice cracks and fades into whimpers... his open-faced shame comes off deeply felt that its stageplay-ready verbosity isn't a strike against it but an opportunity for real emotional catharsis.

Kiefer's great, too, and it's funny how his multiple attempts to create a backstory for his sniper trickster play like a pre-echo of Ledger's Joker in THE DARK KNIGHT. Like that villain, this one delights in "big choice" moral/ethical tests, and big story turns erupt from how Stu responds to those moments of choice.

Joel Schumacher's direction of images isn't a slam dunk. The introduction looks like a Mountain Dew commercial from, go figure, the early 2000s, and a couple of oddball style choices (posterizing a scene's color when showing it from the Caller's perspective, using triple-fades when Stu's delirious) make sense in concept but look more distracting than evocative. But he and his editors and . Matthew Libatique (who lensed almost all of Aronofsky's films) find a strong frenzied look for the film that never tips over into incoherence. And the Brian De Palma split-screens add some extra panache. And he also directs a fantastic performance out of Farrell, so props to him on that.

Also, the hookers are annoying, but I assume that's the point, and so... Godspeed, you overacting ladies. Hit me with those nails on chalkboard voices.

Screenwriter Larry Cohen deserves some sort of award for writing two pretty great phone-based thrillers - the other is the excellent Cellular.

Historical note - this film is probably unfairly remembered as sensationalizing the D.C. Sniper in the fall of 2002. The fact is, the film was done and ready to release when that event happened and was delayed in its release because of that.