“Old McDonald had a shotgun.”

Drake’s rating: *Sniff sniff* Nerds? NERDS!!!

Drake’s review: If director Jack Smight had had his way, then Denzel Washington could well have starred in a Cannon film early in his career. Washington was Smight’s first choice to play Detective Frank Hazeltine in Number One with a Bullet, but Cannon head honcho Menahem Golan was looking for a more established name, and so the part went to Billy Dee Williams instead.

Granted, Washington probably couldn’t have saved Number One with a Bullet, but it still wouldn’t have hurt to have a future Academy award winner in the cast.

Instead, we get Williams, still in full Lando Calrissian mode, playing the trumpet and chasing both women and criminals, the former with unbridled enthusiasm and the latter simply because that’s what one does in a buddy cop movie. But if Williams is playing the smooth-talking, easy-going cop, then who do you get to play the rougher, gruffer half of the cinematic duo? Well, if you’re Cannon Films, you don’t just think outside the box, you take that box and scrunch it up and throw it in the trash bin, and then you hire the man best known for playing a 30-year-old college nerd.

Look, I have no idea what was really in the water coolers around the Cannon offices, but whatever it was somehow made it seem like a good idea at the time to cast Robert Carradine as an action lead. And, sure, if the initial plans had come to fruition then the part of Nick Berzak would have been played by Jim Belushi, so maybe we got lucky. Or maybe not. Honestly, I’m just going to call that one a wash.

But instead of a potential Belushi/Washington pairing we end up with Carradine/Williams, and I don’t know what kind of screen charisma the former duo may have had together but I can tell you this: Robert Carradine and Billy Dee Williams have zero. Zilch. None. And that’s not a good thing in a buddy cop flick.

The problems with Number One with a Bullet go beyond the cast, however. The plot is a jumbled mess, with Berzak intent on chasing down a nefarious drug lord for reasons left unspecified while also stalking his ex-wife Teresa (Valerie Bertinelli) and dodging phone calls from his mother. He and Hazeltine also abuse their prisoners and occasionally get them killed, which is frowned upon by their captain (Peter Graves, no stranger to bad movies himself, but still looking somewhat embarrassed to be seen here). He keeps them on the job, though, probably because he figures an unemployed Berzak would be even more of a danger to the community at large.

Ostensibly an action/comedy, Number One with a Bullet has a few bits of humorous dialogue, but they’re lost in the abyss since no one seems to know how to deliver any clever banter, and most of the exchanges between Bersak and Hazeltine might as well be two guys chatting in the barber shop.

The action fares a little better, thanks to a nice aerial sequence as a helicopter shoots down a small plane and a pretty decent race through a junkyard as the drug lord’s goons chase Hazeltine. But then come the mandatory shoot-outs and all you can think to yourself is, “Who’s bright idea was it to give Lewis Skolnick a gun?”

And then you remember how Lewis creeped on the girls in Revenge of the Nerds and the stalking of his ex-wife makes so much more sense.

Watching a Cannon film is almost always a case of, “You pays yer money and you takes yer chances,” so it’s hard to fault Number One with a Bullet too much for coming up short in basically every movie metric. But from a studio that often made their cinematic failures at least memorable, one can’t help but be disappointed that this one is a fairly forgettable entry into Cannon’s fabled film library.

Then again, they can’t all be Over the Top.

Intermission!

• That Cannon logo hits and it gives me hope that I’ve somehow missed a lost classic. Those hopes will soon be dashed.
• Berzak pays a little kid to spy on his wife for him.
• He then scares off her date by pretending to be a doctor and intimating she has an STD. Berzak is unhinged.
• Hey, a little red Corvette! Sadly, it’s not driven by Prince.
• Hearing Peter Graves say “China White” sounds just as square as you’re thinking it does.
• Hazeltine is afraid of flying. His character is now fully developed.
• It’s the ‘80s, so mud wrestling.
• Honestly, I have zero doubt that Berzak would happily stay in that mud pit for hours after getting thrown into it.
• Man, these guys are hard on their prisoners.
• Nick consider himself a lovable jerk. No, Nick, you’re not lovable in the least.
• The jazz soundtrack is killing me here. SO MUCH whiny sax.