Impossible Phone Numbers, and a Payphone Scene Excised From “John Wick 2”

It may be old news to some, but I got a laugh seeing some strange-looking phone numbers blast through the screen in “John Wick 2”, with Keanu Reeves. They went by fast, but not fast enough for me not to notice something odd about them: They looked like real phone numbers. In movies and television the more-or-less default format for phone numbers uses 555 as the first numbers of the exchange portion of the number, after the area code.

On closer scrutiny, though, these numbers would be impossible to call, at least in this year 2020. I wouldn’t know if, years from now, the supply of phone numbers in North America could possibly reach a point of exhaustion where telcos must deploy numbers like 646-115-7259, 212-142-8538, 315-077-2231, or 917-090-1143.

This little detail helped avoided yet another instance of a movie showing fake phone number in the 555 exchange. That got old tor me a long time ago. Another screen of numbers from “John Wick 2” showed 212-156-9932, 315-194-6020, and 646-061-4988.

I seem to remember someone on a LISTSERV to which I subscribe commenting about seeing similarly impossible phone number in another recent movie, though I wouldn’t remember which one.

I did not actually watch this film from start to finish. I jumped through it in 10-second increments, looking for a scene in which Keanu Reeves uses a pay telephone, as seen in this posting at justjared.com and elsewhere on the web.

Note that the phone is raised up on blocks of something, maybe wood or stone, indicating it is a prop and not a real-life New York City payphone.

It looks like this scene did not make it into the final film. By matching Reeves’ attire and location in New York I jumped all around the film and quickly deduced the scene would have to have occurred near the end, when one second the action is at Lincoln Center and the next second randomly jumps to the Oculus in Lower Manhattan. There were other impossible juxtapositions of place.

But I would have spotted this payphone moment, even without watching the film in real-time. It leaves one to ask not just why the scene was excised, but what plot-twist it might have involved.