In short: Number One with a Bullet (1987)

It’s the 80s, so you will be not terribly surprised to hear that this one’s about an odd couple of terrible cops much better at killing than at investigating anything, as they are stomping down on civil and human rights and are shouted at by their bosses. Wait, actually, this is more realistic than I wanted to give it credit for.

But seriously, the mandatory crazy slob of a cop here is a guy called Barzack (Robert Carradine). When he’s not obsessing about a drug boss he just can’t seem to kill, ahem, put behind bars, he’s wallowing in self pity, eating unhealthily, sabotaging his partner’s sex life, avoiding his mother, torturing junkies and stalking his ex-wife (Valerie Bertinelli), who, because this is a movie, still holds a bit of a torch for him too, for inexplicable reasons. His more together buddy and partner is the suave hobby jazz trumpeter and full-time ladies’ man Hazeltine (Billy Dee Williams). Obviously, the film spends more time with Barzack, because the audience might enjoy themselves otherwise.

I won’t really talk about the plot in any more depth, because we all know more or less what happens in this sort of thing.

Most 80s buddy cop movies play pretty badly to most modern audiences; police brutality, it appears, has stopped to be funny and entertaining for many people. While I’d be perfectly willing to defend more than a few of the genre brethren of Jack Smight’s Number One with a Bullet (not because but despite of their failings), the film at hand really isn’t worth it, for there’s nothing here that makes up for any of its politics. To wit: the action – apart from a short sequence concerning people attempting to flatten Williams – is perfunctory and really not up to the standards of craziness you’d hope for in a Cannon production like this. Barzack is completely insufferable, though the film seems to believe its audience will react with something more akin to “oh, look at that poor broken man”. Instead he’s making this viewer wish for the bad guys to win this time so Barzack will at least stop whining and leave his ex-wife in peace. Williams is wasted on being Carradine’s foil getting very little of interest to do for himself. Let’s not even talk about the plotting that leans on complete nonsense like the protagonists leaving a guy hanging from a building after they have tortured him, so that he can then be conveniently killed by a bad guy, leading to their well-deserved suspension we apparently are supposed to feel to be scandalous.

And then there’s what goes as “humour” for this one, clearly written without the secret knowledge that jokes are supposed to be funny.

It’s rather a disappointing movie coming from an experienced hired hand director like Smight.

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In short: Deadly Illusion (1987)

Private detective Hamberger (Billy Dee Williams) may not have a licence, but he’s got a sexy taxi-driving girlfriend and partner (Vanity), and half of New York’s working class loves him to bits, for reasons he doesn’t understand himself. He, as it turns out, is also the kind of guy who exclusively identifies women by their hair-do; at least that’s what the film implies, for otherwise, most of the plot would make even less sense than it actually does.

“What plot is this?”, you might ask, and the most honest answer would be “hell if I know”. It’s not that the elements of the plot are all that confusing – there’s the usual stuff about the bad guys trying to frame our protagonist for murder and a large scale drug operation – but the way writer/director Larry Cohen fits them together really doesn’t make a lick of sense. It’s not just that the film only works when our hero can’t understand that Morgan Fairchild in a frizzy wig and Morgan Fairchild with her usual blonde hairspray thing are the same person, there’s really little else about this mystery that fits together in a sensible way, be it the plans of the villains (whatever they might be exactly), the actions of our hero or the police. Half of the time, I didn’t even know why any given scene followed the next, and not in a noirish expression of existential confusion, but simple confusion.

Unless, of course, scenes follow each other because Cohen, one of the most New York of all directors, simply thought showing Billy Dee Williams running through this part of New York would be pretty cool at any given moment. After all, Cohen, despite his experience as a screenwriter, often shows a very leisurely idea of plotting, giving his actors a lot of room to improvise. Williams isn’t terribly great at improvisation here, alas, so most of the obviously improvised scenes end up as the sort of goof comedy that should have ended up on the editing room floor.

The film’s not a complete write-off, however, for there are couple of worthwhile moments, at least if you like Larry Cohen’s New York, with some pretty funny moments and lines coming from the various character actors involved. Two of the New York action set pieces are rather fun, too, seeing as they do involve some running and shooting through Shea Stadium and Billy Dee having a chase down a certain rather large Christmas tree.

Which certainly doesn’t turn Deadly Illusion into a film for the casual viewer but keeps it of interest to the Cohen die-hards like me.