We spend a lot of time being critical nowadays, what with the advent of the Internet and the great rise of the armchair critic. We think that’s okay, as well; in a world where media is everywhere, all the time, it’s good to be an informed consumer and pay attention to what your brain is soaking in on a day to day basis. Part of being a savvy media consumer is asking questions or poking holes in the absurd and ridiculous movie plots that we experience damn near every time we sit down to watch a flick nowadays. There have been some alarmingly strange movie ideas that come out in the last while, and it got us to thinking about some of the most ridiculous movie plots of all time, and how there’s some that are so spectacularly outrageous that we can’t help but love them; as such, we’re bringing you a list of 10 movies with astoundingly ridiculous plots (that turned out to be incredible).
10. Phone Booth (2002)
We’re betting you probably forgot about this little film that was released way back in 2002, starring Colin Farrell, Katie Holmes, Forest Whitaker, and Kiefer Sutherland. One of the few movies released in real-time (as in, the events in the film unfold exactly as we’re seeing them, minus a flashback or two), Phone Booth tells the story of Stu Shephard (Farrell), a swanky New York City publicist who’s been having an affair with a young woman and working towards checking off all the boxes on the “Am I a Scumbag?” list when an unfortunate set of circumstances befalls him. Stu, while walking down the street, stops to answer a ringing phone (conveniently located in a phone booth…when was the last time you saw one of those?). As his bad luck would have it, the sniper on the other end (played menacingly by Kiefer Sutherland) wants to correct some of the bad habits in Stu’s behavior and keeps him on the line to torment him for the next 90-odd minutes. It’s a fairly ridiculous premise, but in an astonishing turn of events, Phone Booth isn’t a bad film…it’s kind of great.
Source: Screenshot via 20th Century Fox