Review: The Baltimore Bullet

Pool shark Nick Casey (James Coburn) is the title character, who along with his idiot gambler partner/protégé Billie Joe Robbins (Bruce Boxleitner) is headed for a big pool tournament where the winner gets to face off against The Deacon (Omar Sharif), this film’s version of ‘The Man’, whom Casey has some history with. For the most part though, the film is mostly Nick and Billie Joe travelling around and making silly bets and hitting on women. Enter Ronee Blakley, a country singer the duo meet along the way. Jack O’Halloran turns up as a hulking thug with a seeming grudge against one of the pool-playing characters here, Michael Lerner is the chief organiser/emcee of the tournament, while Calvin Lockhart is an effete but dangerous weirdo named Snow White.

 

Although James Coburn is much more agreeable company than Paul Newman in “The Hustler”, this 1980 pool hustler film is a pretty crummy dry-run for the later “The Colour of Money”. Directed by Robert Ellis Miller (the flawed but interesting “The Heart is a Lonely Hunter”) and poorly scripted by John Brascia (far more prolific as a dancer and occasional actor) and Robert Vincent O’Neil (who made the first two films in the “Angel” series), it’s unlikely to satisfy anyone. Coburn is perfect and smooth-as-hell as the mentor, though TV-movie titan Boxleitner is bland in a strangely underdeveloped protégé character. At first I didn’t mind that the film didn’t focus all that much on the game of pool itself, even heading to the poker table from time to time. I’m not really a fan of pool/snooker/billiards, so it didn’t initially bother me. However, even the ‘big game’ is horribly botched, we don’t even get to watch the finale, it’s off-screen! It’s one of the most incompetent, amateur hour mistakes I’ve ever come across in a film. Who in the hell was supposed to enjoy this film? The characters aren’t terribly well-written, the situations are clichéd, the ‘big game’ is botched…what’s left to enjoy? Yeah, Coburn’s good as usual, and Michael Lerner gives a fun, slightly sleazy performance, but why should I care when the filmmakers clearly don’t care about the central conflict/tournament? We all know where it’s headed, but could the writers and the director at least try to make the tournament leading up to it seem even remotely interesting? Meanwhile, Jack O’Halloran plays a character the screenwriters don’t even try to make sense of. One minute he’s trying to assassinate one of the players (who the hell assassinates pool players?), next minute he’s just a gambler who wants to steal the money, while others are doing the assassination plot instead. What? And don’t even get me started on the bizarre, but thankfully brief interlude involving Calvin Lockhart in a cameo as ‘Snow White’. I can’t even with that. It’s a bizarre set-piece that sinks an already subpar film.

 

Omar Sharif is ideally chosen as essentially a mixture of Minnesota Fats and Robert Shaw from “The Sting”, but sadly his talents are left wasted in a shamefully underwritten part. It’s practically a glorified cameo. Ronee Blakley is typically poor in a film that doesn’t really need her character at all, let alone give her anything of interest to say or do. I don’t know if that’s her singing or not, but whoever it is, they’re awful. The one amusing thing here is the running gag involving the two leads making bets over women, with Coburn scoring every single time because he’s smooth as fuck.

 

The cast is mostly game, but this is a dull, frankly inept gambling film unlikely to satisfy anyone. The finale is especially head-scratching, thanks to inept screenwriting and the director’s dumb decision to not show what we’re all watching the film to see. Who in the hell thought this dud was going to please anyone? It has rightly faded into obscurity.

 

Rating: D+