Post by StevePulaski on Jun 28, 2017 23:00:23 GMT -5
Poolhall Junkies (2002)
Directed by: Mars Callahan
Directed by: Mars Callahan
Mars Callahan in Poolhall Junkies.
Rating: ★★½
Co-writer, director, and star of Poolhall Junkies Gregory "Mars" Callahan looks as if someone crossed High Fidelity-era John Cusack with Good Will Hunting-era Ben Affleck, and maybe gave him a few brooding lessons from Derek Vinyard. He looks and moves like a walking pile of angst that was often found in nineties dramas, and this directorial effort of his feels like a gathering of friends that decided to take their passion to heights previously unexplored.
Poolhall Junkies is an ode by Callahan and friends to the game of billiards, what Callahan and his co-writer Chris Corso used as a vehicle to attempt to hustle one another until they became fast friends and stormed up this competently made, if often uneven, dramatic thriller. The banality of billiards being the central game-of-choice to a relatively low-budget film reminds us how it's usually not the core sport that attracts us to this type of film, but the seedy underbelly and characters who owe their success and even financial security to the specific game. To compare Poolhall Junkies to quintessential gambling films such as Martin Scorsese's Casino or Karel Reisz's The Gambler is a foolish thing to do, but perhaps Callahan and company would've done themselves a great service perhaps taking a quicker look at the playbook on how to make a drama of this nature that sticks rather than simply entertains.
The film revolves around gambling/billiards slickster Johnny Doyle (Callahan), who has made something of a dirty living hustling everyone from teenagers to greaseballs at the local pool hall owned and operated by his aging pal. Abandoned by his parents, Johnny was adopted by Joe (Chazz Palminteri), a talent manager in the game, who took his cut from Johnny's talents but denied his chance to go professional. Johnny's discovery of this fact leads him to sever ties with Joe - but not before Joe severs his hand - by taking a new pool protege named Brad (Rick Shroder) under his wing, also involving Brad's brother Danny (Michael Rosenbaum) with his latest ventures.
Johnny also gets a bit too close to his girlfriend's uncle Mike (Christopher Walken), a millionaire lawyer who takes an interest in Johnny's ability to hustle and hustle well under nearly any given circumstance. Of course, inevitably, bets will be made where people's lives and fortunes are put on the line in the name of a game where balls are hit with three foot-long sticks of polished wood and determined by force and momentum. Disappointingly, there's never a real discussion about the geometrical probability or improbability of ostensibly implausible shots making their way into the desired corner or side pockets, but alas, that subtraction is comped by an increasing number of pool trick-shots, all of which authentic but not all made by Callahan, according to the grapevine.
Of course I'm being facetious in some regard here, and I believe Callahan and company are too. No matter how high the stakes for the characters are and no matter the current situation, there's a light-hearted aura about this film you don't see very often. Perhaps it's the evidently cheap aesthetic, or the fact that glimmers in the eyes of Callahan and Shroder exist in moments where Palminteri or Walken is busy commanding a scene, as if they themselves are astonished that two acting greats are standing before them. Obviously, in a sea of amateur or background actors, the aforementioned veterans take control of the most predictable scenes and make them their own, Palminteri with his grimace and Walken with his staccato manner of speaking. There's a key monologue late in the film where Walken goes on an aimless, debatably improv, spiel about how wild animals symbolize Johnny's current situation and it's exactly the kind of thing you could imagine being the sole reason why Walken would sign up for a project like this.
Poolhall Junkies gets convoluted as it moves forward, however, with bets and hustles being so deeply entangled in and around one another that the stakes are sometimes difficult to keep straight, especially by the end, when it seems nothing more than a free-for-all. Moments in the climax feel less energetic than previous moments and we are left with the simple hope that we'll get some good shots of billiard balls doing the impossible, and that we do.
Callahan's film is a fine one, made with a lot of passion for the game and film evident, as well as scored lovingly with some original, in-house tracks giving the film an early-2000s, punk rock edge. It's made lovingly and often interestingly, and there's a simplicity even in the convoluted third-act that allows one to enjoy this film without wracking their mind like the triangle of balls at the start of every pool game.
Starring: Mars Callahan, Chazz Palminteri, Christopher Walken, Rick Shroder, and Michael Rosenbaum. Directed by: Mars Callahan.