Review
POOLHALL JUNKIES
Starring Mars Callahan, Chazz Palminteri and Christopher Walken
Co-written and directed by Mars Callahan
Opens Friday, March 21
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Sports movies need more substance than the sport itself. If you’re going to care about a sport-based movie, you need to care about the characters. If you don’t, it’s just a long, scripted sporting event. Poolhall Junkies focuses on a boring sport (pool), lacks characterization, and doesn’t offer anything else to draw you in.
Junkies is an attempt at Tarantinoism – creating a rough, wild world full of hard knocks, punchy dialogue and vivid characters – with pool as the base. It fails because pool isn’t very rough or exciting, and because you don’t get into the characters enough to worry much about what happens to them.
In a nutshell, Johnny Doyle (director and co-writer Greg "Mars" Callahan) has been mentored as a pool hustler by Joe (Chazz Palminteri), who is holding him back at the same time. After Johnny realizes that he has been duped by his shyster mentor throughout his entire pool-shark career, he goes through a series of dummy jobs, breaks up with his law school girlfriend, and finally falls back into hustling, since pool sharking is his only talent. Meanwhile, ol’ Joe finds a new student, Brad (NYPD Blue’s Rick Schroder), and, of course, the whole thing leads into a big pool-off between Joe’s old and new protégés. Does Johnny win the pool-off? Does Brad make the dough for Joe? Do Johnny and his girlfriend get back together? Will you care?
Don’t count on it. The characters you’d actually care about are the ones you don’t get enough of. Johnny’s sassy brother, Danny (Michael Rosenbaum) is the yin to Johnny’s boring yang, but is under-used and undeveloped. He acts crazy, keeps things edgy and then gets sent to jail, which makes the movie even more boring. Danny’s friends are wacky and fun too, but they get little attention and no development. There’s the putzy kid, the skinny rich kid virgin who thinks all girls are weird and the kid who goes away for some reason, then comes back. They all seem to have side-stories, and would probably make an interesting movie themselves. Instead, they play pool, lend Johnny money, touch boobs and generally spend a lot of time standing around.
Johnny’s relationship with Mike (Christopher Walken), a retired, rich lawyer he meets at a party, and who later backs him during the anti-climactic pool-off, is equally vague. They play pool together once and win, so they’re friends. Maybe that’s enough justification for their relationship in Poolville or Pool City, Nebraska, or wherever they are, but I need more than that.
Even Johnny’s relationship with his girlfriend, Tara (Alison Eastwood), is illogical and unexplained. What do a lawyer and a pool shark have in common? Why do they stay together? Love conquers all? Right. And monkeys wear hats.
The films Men With Brooms and Prefontaine, about curling and marathon running respectively, prove that sports movies can be engaging even when they’re about boring sports. The focus in each of those films isn’t really on the sport, but on the characters. If Callahan had kept that in mind, Poolhall Junkies would have been a much better film. Oh, and not making it entirely predictable would have helped, too. |
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