This Looks Terrible! Number One With a Bullet (1987)

My career is full of weird coincidences. For John Candy Month, for example, I wrote about two sub-par John Candy vehicles that owe their curious, unfortunate and not entirely necessary existences to John Belushi even though he does not appear in either. 1986’s Armed and Dangerous was created by Harold Ramis as a vehicle for the team of Belushi and Dan Aykroyd before Belushi’s death complicated matters while 1985’s Summer Rental was inspired by super-producer Bernie Brillstein returning to his summer house to discover that client John Belushi had thrown a massive party and was sleeping in his bed. 

The staggeringly awful 1987 mismatched buddy cop romp Number One With a Bulletin, meanwhile, was conceived as a vehicle for Belushi’s famously less talented sibling James, to the point that the According to Jim star received his only screenwriting credit for his contributions to the script. 

Cannon schlockmeisters Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus undoubtedly wanted some of that John Belushi flair for the role of renegade undercover cop Detective Nick “Berserk” Barzak. Unfortunately, John Belushi was dead, so they had to settle for James Belushi. Alas, even he apparently had the good sense to not want to star in a movie co-written by untalented first-timer like himself. 

The producers then undoubtedly went looking for a James Belushi type, and when even that somehow proved unsuccessful they settled for a journeyman character actor and professional geek nothing like the Beloosh in Robert Carradine, a veteran best known for his role as a nerd in the Revenge of the Nerds saga and, like the actor he replaced, for having cooler, more talented brothers (Keith and David). 

Number One With a Bullet was clearly written for a James Belushi type, by the ultimate James Belushi type: James Belushi. What is a James Belushi type? He’s like a John Belushi type, but glibber and without the underlying soul and slobbish lovability. You might imagine that any substitution would represent a step up when you’re dealing with the low-wattage likes of James Belushi. 

An appallingly miscast Robert Carradine is abysmal as a psychotic, charmless sociopath who is one quarter James Belushi type and three quarters Mel Gibson in Lethal Weapon. Considering that Number One With a Bullet somehow hit theaters two weeks before Richard Donner’s iconic instant pop classic changed action movies forever and provided the trusty template for all of the mismatched buddy cop comedies  to follow it’s borderline uncanny how much Number One With a Bullet resembles Lethal Weapon. 

Alas, Carradine doesn’t just lack the danger, sex and charisma of Mel Gibson in his prime: he lacks the danger, edge, sex and charisma of Eddie Deezen. Curtis Armstrong, the actor who played Booger opposite the dorkiest Carradines in the Revenge of the Nerds films, would have brought more edge to the role. 

Instead of the punchy, wildly influential script that made the explosively talented young Shane Black one of the hottest and best-paid screenwriters in the business we have tin-eared dialogue like, “I catch you dealing any snowflakes in this neighborhood, I goddamn cripple you!” and “I am not your normal jive-ass cop. And around here you have no rights!”

Carradine barks that last line to one of the film’s many cartoonish drug dealers and addicts to illustrate that he’s not one of those weak-willed daisies who worries about matters such as criminal rights, or civil rights, or the constitution. Like recent Control Nathan Rabin 4.0 entry,  McBain, Number One With a Bullet subscribes to the curious logic that it’s not possible to exercise excessive force when dealing with the threat of drugs, which makes it all the more deliciously ironic that it feels like it was written by men whose creative juices were replenished via shoeboxes full of cocaine. 

Name a more iconic duo!

I suppose it shouldn’t come as a surprise that during the decade of “Just Say No” and Ronald Reagan, action movies, particularly mismatched buddy cop movies, didn’t just expect audiences to identify automatically with cop protagonists: they were expected to root for dirty cops who tortured, abused and killed the drug dealers they confronted in their investigations as long as they got results. And they ALWAYS got results.

The mismatched buddy cop movie is full of cops who don’t play by the rules, and the rule they did not play by most frequently was the one prohibiting them from egregiously violating the rights of criminals in their mad zeal to get their man.

Number One With a Bullet opens with Carradine’s Nick “Berserk” Barzack horning in on satin-smooth partner Frank Hazeltine (Billy Dee Williams) during a sexy jazz date where he bewitches one of a series of sexy young things by blowing some seriously smoky horn and following it up with some slick talk about classical music and jazz and the jazz in classical music. 

Then Carradine’s bargain basement Martin Riggs sleazes over to praise Hazeltine as the best cop he knows, gushing to his date, “I once saw Frank go into a bar full of d-kes and kick the shit out of all of them. Then he burned the place to the ground, just to teach them a lesson.” 

This succeeds in getting the beautiful young woman to flee in horror and there’s a book-end for this charming sequence later in the film when Nick, in his continual efforts to keep his best friend from getting laid, calls up his latest conquest pretending to be his gay lover, complaining, “Woman to woman, I feel so cheap and so used” by Frank, leading the horrified beauty to angrily call Hazeltine a homophobic epithet and storm off in disgust. 

Even the film’s attempts to humanize and soften its maverick cop on the edge make him seem creepy. Berserk is yet another cop with a complicated, messy domestic situation: namely he’s still hung up on ex-wife Teresa (Valerie Bertinelli), two years after their split. 

He’s so lovesick, in fact, that he has a little girl keep track of the men she might be sleeping with, and when he spies a rival for her affections the rogue cop pretends to be a physician tasked with sharing news of a sexually transmitted disease his ex-wife has and is danger of spreading to all of her partners. The film does not specify whether the disease in question is AIDS, or Syphilis, or Gonorrhea. They leave it to viewers to decide for themselves what fictional malady Nick is pretending the love of his life has in order to scare off potential suitors. All that matters is it works, because Nick cares, dammit, and how can you not root for a guy like that? 

Hazeltine will say anything to get a reaction but also because he’s calculatingly “crazy” in pretty much exactly the same way as Gibson in Lethal Weapon. They even have similar wardrobes heavy on jeans, and black tee shirts under flannel shirts. 

Number One With a Bullet is such an inept Lethal Weapon clone that I wasn’t just reminded of the quintessential buddy-cop blockbuster: I was reminded of the gleefully offensive, blackface-intensive homemade Lethal Weapon sequels of the gang in It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia as well.

As with the iconic cop on the edge played in Gibson, there is a method to Berserk’s madness. His performative “insanity” serves a purpose: criminals are so terrified by the prospect that a fucking pig might be even crazier and more dangerous than they are that they’re scared and intimidated into doing his bidding. 

These renegades are charged with protecting an important witness but when he is killed while in their custody it leads these outlaw lawmen on an investigation involving a big shot scion of society and a mole in their own department.

Nick and Frank are a study in opposites. Frank is a flashily dressed dandy with bedroom eyes and an endless parade of one-night girlfriends. He’s educated and erudite, with a weakness for martinis and health food. Frank is what I would refer to as a “snob” in sharp contrast to Nick’s “Slob”.

Where Carradine is memorably miscast against type as a sexy, dangerous outlaw, a far cry from his wheelhouse playing everything from nerds to geeks to Poindexters to dateless wonders to the socially challenged to dorky dads, Williams is typecast once again as the Billy Dee Williams character. 

This unfortunately reduces the blaxploitation icon to sidekick status. Just a few years after Return of the Jedi, Williams found himself stuck playing the straight man to a doofus egregiously out of his element. 

In defiance of mismatched buddy cop movie formula, the undercover detectives of Number One With a Bullet are partners when the movie begins and already like each other. So there’s no real arc for their friendship. They begin the movie as renegades who are best friends despite their very different personalities and lifestyles and maintain that relationship throughout the entire film. 

And though they are dissimilar in every other way, Frank shares his partner’s fierce Fascist conviction that if you are a bad man and do the drugs, then you deserve to die, or to be tortured, or dangled off a tall building by a hook for your sins. Though he’s nowhere near as crass as his partner, Frank also feels that his badge makes him judge, jury and especially executioner. 

Williams is certainly game but there’s just nothing to his character being handsome and suave. 

Unfortunately for Williams, “womanizing” is not a character. It can certainly be part of a character but it cannot be a character in its entirety. The same goes for smooth, Heavens know we love smooth characters like Lando Calrissian but they need to be something beyond smooth. 

There was more depth and substance to Williams’ turn as Colt 45 pitchman than there is to his thankless role as Robert Carradine’s slick sidekick here. And that’s just the print ads! 

Number One With a Bullet was directed by Jack Smight, who in a kinder era directed the classic Paul Newman detective movie Harper and the tricky, intriguing 1968 cult film No Way to Treat a Lady, an adaptation of a William Goldman novel, but by this point in his career he seems to have stopped caring and trying. 

Goofus to Lethal Weapon’s Gallant, Number One With a Bullet shares a cinematographer and a love of darkness with Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia but where Sam Peckinpah’s 1974 masterpiece was shot in near total darkness to reflect its grimly fatalistic worldview, the dim lighting here seems designed to mask the film’s cheapness. 

Number One With a Bullet is cheap and vulgar and crude in that distinctive Cannon fashion but nowhere near as guiltily entertaining as the glorious trash that made the studio’s name. What’s worse than a shitty James Belushi mismatched buddy cop comedy? A film that desperately wants to be a shitty James Belushi mismatched buddy cop comedy but has to settle for less. 

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