Tag Archives: billiard movie

Toolsidas Junior

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Netflix Founder and Co-CEO Reed Hastings is bullish on the Indian market. At the end of 2019, he shared the company’s intent to invest $400 million in Indian content. Whether Netflix’s current financial setbacks will slow that investment is uncertain, but already the company has launched more than 90 original Indian titles. 

One of those titles, released this past May, is Toolsidas Junior, a snooker movie written and directed by Mridul Mahendra, and arguably the first full-length billiards movie to come out of Bollywood. It’s a feel-good, feels-long film about 13-year-old Midi (Varun Buddhadev), who seeks to avenge his father’s sixth and most recent loss at the 1994 Calcutta Sports Club Snooker Championship. 

Watching his father Toolsidas (Rajeev Kapoor) get humiliated by the “unbeatable” Jimmy Tandon (Dalip Tahil) stings all the more when Midi realizes that Jimmy intentionally preyed on his father’s dipsomania by plying him with liquor during a break in the match.

Unfortunately, it takes more than half the movie for that early epiphany to translate into action. After his initial attempts to learn snooker at an exclusive club hit a wall because his “feet don’t reach the floor” and he’ll “tear the (baize/felt) table,” Midi finds an available table at the Wellington YMC in the seedy, impoverished other side of town. 

There, he befriends Mohammad Salaam Bhia (Sanjay Dutt), the laconic ex-national snooker champion, whose daily snooker routine consists of alternating between hour-long naps and practices, while intimidated onlookers marvel in the background. 

Salaam Bhia finds Midi’s determination endearing, triggering an 11-month training routine, which consists of offering Midi cryptic aphorisms (e.g., “to see clearly, must befriend the darkness”) and juvenile appellations (e.g., the six colored balls are named Jaundice, Pinky, Blackie, Chocolate, Parrot, and Billoo) and admonitions (e.g., “the left hand is not used just to clean your butt”). Pop cultural references also play a role in Salaam Bhia’s regimen. Various forms of cue ball spin are analogized to the fighting styles of famous Indian action stars. For example, to hit topspin, think of Amitabh Bachchan, who always follows through on his punch.

For viewers who lament the paucity of snooker films over the past twenty years (Perfect Break, The Rack Pack, and Break notwithstanding), Toolsidas Junior will likely offer little consolation. The opening scene, with its meticulous attention to brushing, chalking, and ironing the baize before the match begins, suggests the film will devote lavish attention to billiards. But, while snooker is essential to the plot, the sport itself gets proportionally less on-camera time than one would expect. 

This is true even for the predictable ending at the 1995 championship, when Midi plays under the moniker Toolsidas Junior. The snooker sequences just don’t dazzle, though it’s difficult to begrudge the film, given it’s impossible not to root for the young cherubic underdog. 

Interestingly, Toolsidas Junior opens by saying the film is “inspired by true events,” though the closing credits clarify the film is at least semi-autobiographical for the director.  In an interview, Mr. Mahendra shared, “Snooker has been a very pivotal part of my life, especially because of the memories it beholds with my father. Toolsidas Junior depicts one of the most cherished parts of my life. I fought hard to bring my father glory back then and I wanted to do the same by making Toolsidas Junior.”

Alas, this odic film carries with it a sad epilogue. Mr. Mahendra had arranged a special screening of Toolsidas Junior for his real father and Rajiv Kapoor, who returned to acting after three decades to play Toolsidas. However, both men – the real father and the on-screen one – passed away in the same year before the film’s release.

Money Shot

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In 2016, during his final year at the New York Film Academy, director Tom Edwards created his 15-minute thesis film, Money Shot. The movie’s premise is simple: a virtual reality (VR) pool game addict (Liam) must exit the digital world and enter the real world to compete in a pool tournament to save the life of his brother (Nigel), who is indebted to a local drug lord. 

The all-or-nothing, do-or-die, billiards tournament is a familiar trope in billiards movies. From The Baron and the Kid to Stickmen, from Kiss Shot to Up Against the 8 Ball, down-and-out players have bet it all on the baize, hoping to avert bankruptcy, family dissolution, death, and all of the above.

Money Shot opens with Liam, who is frustrated that his Pure Pool VR gaming system no longer works since his roommate brother hasn’t paid the internet bill. Forced to emerge from his alt-reality, Liam can barely hold a conversation with his brother’s Tinder girlfriend, and he quickly retreats into blackness by re-donning his virtual headset.  But, when Liam learns that Nigel owes $3000 to a murderous kingpin, he throws away the VR goggles, picks up his cue stick, and heads to the local 8-ball tournament, with its $5000 grand prize, to hopefully pay off his brother’s bounty.

While the film’s camera work, editing, pacing, and use of music (“Uprising” by Muse) are quite effective, especially for a college senior, the overly convenient tournament, coupled with an uninspiring pool-playing montage (that focuses more on handshakes with fallen opponents than the strokes it took to beat them), should make Money Shot more of a table scratch in my billiards annals.

Yet, for all its overused elements, the film does pose a fascinating question that I have never encountered in almost ten years of reviewing billiards movies: does playing virtual pool make one a better real-life pool player?

Within online pool forums, the topic of virtual pool increasingly arises, starting with the verisimilitude of the leading games, such as Virtual Pool 4 (created by Celeris) or Shooterspool (created by EVEHO Ingeniería). Players share and debate the graphics, physics, and accuracy.

SportsBar VR

Less popular, but more germane to the game Liam is playing in Money Shot, are the virtual reality pool games, such as Maxi Pool Masters VR, Black Hole Pool, SportsBar VR, or the genre’s OG, PoolNation VR.  All of these games require hand controls and VR headsets (e.g., HTC Vive, Oculus Rift). As the user has no ability to physically lean on the table and line up shots, ambidextrous coordination is required to manipulate separate controls, a trigger button, and sometimes a “ghost reticle.” It’s hard to imagine mastering virtual reality pool, let alone the experience translating to the billiards hall.

Many billiards pundits and amateur players scoff at the question. They cite some plausible benefits (e.g., better understanding of angles, ball position, strategy), but otherwise deem the game largely untransferable since cue control and technique cannot be replicated. Yet, a recent study by two professors from San José State University suggests otherwise. Using the Pool Hall Pro video game, a Wii game console and a Wii game controller attached to a physical cue stick, participants were able to improve their performance on a variety of shots. The researchers concluded, “the video game system [with the haptic technology]  improved people’s real-life pool performance.”1

Regardless of the validity of the research, for the almost 400,000 of us who have watched snooker world champion Ronnie O’Sullivan try to use PoolNation VR back in 2016, the answer is likely to produce skepticism and guffaws.  (Sorry Ronnie, that looked like it hurt.) If Ronnie is falling over, what chance do the rest of us have?

Money Shot is available to watch on director Tom Edwards’ Vimeo site.

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  1. “How Haptic Feedback in a Mixed Reality Pool Game Affects Real-Life Pool Performance,” Elaine Thai and Anil R. Kumar, published in the Proceedings of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society 2019 Annual Meeting.

Gamblin’

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When you think of the Baldwins, Daniel may not be the first of the four brothers that comes to mind. 

There’s Alec, of course.  

There’s Stephen, who starred in The Usual Suspects before he found religion and became a born-again Evangelical. 

There’s Billy, the former fashion model and MTV heartthrob, who steamed up the screen with Sharon Stone in Sliver and much more recently got all crazy weird in Too Old to Die Young. 

Lastly, there is Daniel, who having made the reality TV circuit on Celebrity Fit Club, Celebrity Rehab with Dr. Drew, Celebrity Wife Swap, I’m a Celebrity…Get Me Out of Here!, and Celebrity Big Brother, now appears in a lot of movies no one has heard of.  

Gamblin' movie posterBut in the late ‘90s, Daniel was everywhere. He’d already spent three years as Detective Beau Felton in the award-winning NBC TV series Homicide: Life on the Street. He closed out the millennium by appearing in more than 20 movies, sharing billing with popular stars such as James Woods, Ray Liotta, and Steve Buscemi.

One of those was the short billiards film Gamblin’. According to director Wayne Orkline, it wasn’t even initially intended to be a released movie. “I made it as a calling card to Hollywood…to show to studio people who might then be interested in making other films of mine,” Mr. Orkline shared with me in a  video interview a couple of years ago.

Getting Mr. Baldwin to star in Gamblin’ was a “fluke,” according to Mr. Orkline. “A friend was an acquaintance of Daniel’s. He sent him the script.  Two weeks later, my phone rings, ‘This is Daniel Baldwin. I like this script. I want to do this.’ At the time, he was making big movies [e.g, John Carpenter’s Vampires]. He said if I gave him some kind of ownership of the movie, he’d do it for free. Once he came on board, everything else came together.”

The concept for Gamblin’ – specifically, how the addiction of gambling can lead to very bad decisions – had been rattling around in Mr. Orkline’s mind for years. “I always loved sports gambling. Growing up on the East Coast, we would gamble on basketball, football games.  As I was doing it for fun, I would meet people who really had a gambling problem. I started seeing patterns. This is an addiction. Always stuck with me. I would see people do things that they wouldn’t normally do to gamble, and I thought to myself, ‘How far would a person go?’”

Without spoiling the film, the answer to that question is pretty damn far. Pike (Daniel Baldwin) is $56,000 in debt to Pappy (Carmen Angenziano). To erase the debt, Pike must beat Pappy, two out of three, in nineball. But, if he loses, he must have sex with a young woman in the room whom he knows well, but is otherwise unidentified, while Papi watches. 

The whole film occurs  in a single, dingy  billiards room, where the lighting and camera angles create a claustrophobic atmosphere.  Once the rules of the bet have been established, most of the movie’s dialogue either focuses on Pike’s futile negotiation efforts or his female compatriot’s ever-increasing pressure to win.  

Given a full day of filming was devoted to pool shots and Mr. Baldwin is comfortable with a cue stick, the primary action is watching balls get pocketed and the players’ various reactions as they inch closer to the endgame, and of course, the denouement’s sinister reveal.

The movie premiered at the LA Shorts Film Festival in 2000 to an estimated crowd of 300 people. One day later, Showtime called, saying they wanted to license the film for heavy rotation on the Sundance Channel for two years. They even picked up the music licensing costs, which were substantial, given the movie features tracks from The Rolling Stones, The Allman Brothers, and John Lee Hooker.  But after renewing it through 2005, Showtime permanently shelved it. (I was only able to watch Gamblin’ thanks to Mr. Orkline generously mailing me a copy.)

Unfortunately, Gamblin’ didn’t open as many doors as Mr. Orkline had hoped. He went up to Canada to work again with Mr. Baldwin on Fall: The Prince of Silence, but it was a bust. Though the two remain friends, they didn’t collaborate again. Today, Mr. Orkline writes and assists his girlfriend, the actress Kelly Mullis. 

Nonetheless, the experience of making Gamblin’ was a great joy for Mr. Orkline. Throughout our interview, he warmly and  vividly spoke about the film’s creation, recounting nuanced details from twenty years ago. 

Perhaps most rewarding was the subsequent call he got from veteran director John Carpenter (The Thing; Escape from New York; Halloween), one of Mr. Orkline’s cinematic influences. “Wayne, I loved it. I didn’t see the end coming. It was sick and twisted.”

I’m gambling Mr. Orkline didn’t see that call coming.

Top of the Heap – “Behind the Eight Ball”

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Top of the Heap is truly the bottom of the barrel.

Granted, I only watched “Behind the Eight Ball,” the series’ third episode that aired in April, 1991.  But, there is a reason this Married… with Children spinoff only lasted seven episodes. It’s comedic dregs, sitcom sludge, the sort of show even a laugh track finds humorless.

Top of the Heap focuses on the attempts of Charlie Verducci (Joseph Bologna) and his son Vinnie (Matt LeBlanc)—to get rich. Charlie’s “master plan” is for Vinnie to marry into a wealthy family; to this end, the father-son duo tries to break into high society, which includes Vinnie getting a job at a country club and Charlie pining for the club’s manager Alixandra Stone (Rita Moreno).

(How Mr. LeBlanc ever rebounded from this dumpster fire to join the cast of Friends three years later and ultimately earn $1 million per episode defies explanation.)

In “Behind the Eight Ball,” Charlie is concerned that Alixandra may have eyes for Warren Prado, a wealthy new club member, so Charlie tries to hustle him in a game of nineball.  However, after witnessing someone call the man “Godfather” and kiss his hand, he quickly starts to backpedal, fearing for his life and “spelling help in [his] underwear.”

The acting is robotic, and the jokes are cringeworthy, but there are few highlights worth mentioning. Joey Lauren Adams plays Vinnie’s high school-aged neighbor (two years before her first major role in Dazed and Confused); Christina Applegate, reprising her Kelly Bundy role, appears for continuity’s sake; and two former Playboy models, Heather Parkhurst and a 24-year-old Pamela Anderson, show up to… show off. There are also two enjoyable trick shots, including one (seen here) that entails hitting five balls into four pockets with one shot.

But it’s hard to muster a smile amidst the egregious billiards inaccuracies, such as when the cue ball is ricocheted into a nearby aquarium and then miraculously appears on the table in the next shot. Or, in a game of nine-ball, when Charlie’s opponent sinks the nine with the cue, while leaving the two on the table (?!).

William Finnegan, The “Godfather of Pool”

It’s hardly a spoiler, but Mr. Prado turns out not to be that kind of godfather, but rather just some bub’s male sponsor. Of course, this got me thinking: what is the relation between billiards and criminal godfathers? Or, even better, between billiards and The Godfather? 

For starters, several players have adopted the nickname “The Godfather,” including Taiwan’s Zhuang Zhiyuan and the Phillipines’ Aristeo “Putch” Puyat. Readers of my blog may also recall Steinway-Café Billiards regular William Finnegan, the self-proclaimed “Godfather of Pool,” who has appeared in multiple billiards reality shows, including The Hustlers, the “Emily” episode of In A Man’s World, and Kiss of Death.

Though none of these individuals appear connected to the mafia, the game of billiards has on occasion been associated with illegal activity, specifically gambling.  So much so that in the 1920s, the Illinois Billiards Association was committed to keeping crime and booze out of billiards halls, as part of their “clean billiards crusade.” And before Johnny Torrio built the Chicago Outfit and turned loose his protégé Al Capone, he got his start in crime by opening a local pool hall in New York, where he ran an illegal gambling operation.  More recently, Gerald Huber recounts many “war stories” of billiards, gambling, and mobsters in his autobiography The Green Felt Jungle.

Unfortunately, Mario Puzo and Francis Ford Coppola chose to ignore the underworld billiards connection in writing and directing The Godfather movies.

Andy Garcia looking bored in “The Godfather III”

While plenty of gangster films have noteworthy billiards scenes (e.g, Mean Streets; The Krays; The Departed), the only billiards scene in Mr. Coppola’s trilogy is an unmemorable dialogue in The Godfather III between Connie Corleone (Talia Shire) and her nephew Vincent (Andy Garcia), while he is playing pool. 

That’s a shame, given the iconic Hearst Estate mansion that was used in The Godfather as the home of movie producer Jack Woltz included a 32-foot-high billiards room. 

It’s not like the Corleones – or at least, the actors who played them – didn’t know how to shoot billiards.

Marlon Brando in “Viva Zapata”

Twenty years before Marlon Brando became the Don, he was playing pool off set with his Viva Zapata co-star Anthony Quinn. So too did Robert DeNiro, the younger Vito of The Godfather II. He was quite happy at the table, as seen in The Deer Hunter. 

Sonny Corleone’s gangster career may have been short-lived, but actor James Caan moved forward, picking up a cue stick one year later in Cinderella Liberty and then again – on horseback! – in Another Man, Another Chance. And, the incoming godfather, Al Pacino, makes one of the best “magic time” shots in eightball a decade later as Carlito Brigante in Carlito’s Way.

As for Fredo…poor Fredo. He wanted to be at the top of heap, but he took sides against the family and truly wound up behind the eight ball.

The “Behind the Eight Ball” episode of Top of the Heap is available to watch on Crackle.

Siete mesas de billar francés

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The Goya Awards are Spain’s main national film awards. They are considered by many in Spain, and internationally, to be the Spanish equivalent of the Oscars. So imagine my excitement upon learning that Grace Querejeta’s 2007 film Siete mesas de billar francés (translated as Seven French Billiards Tables) received 10 Goya nominations, including two wins for Best Leading Actress (Maribel Verdú) and Best Supporting Actress (Amparo Baró).

To put that in perspective, there are 53 movies that have earned at least 10 Oscar nominations. That pantheon includes Lawrence of Arabia, The Sting, Network, Star Wars, and Braveheart, to name a handful with exactly 10 nominations. Pretty impressive company.

Among billiards movies, only two have walked the red carpet: The Hustler (nine nominations, including two wins) and twenty-five years later The Color of Money (four nominations, including one win).

This movie should have been cinematic oro. What a disappointment.

Siete mesas de billar francés feels like a telenovela, with a bunch of broken relationships and budding romances fighting for viewer attention. The movie begins with Angela (Verdú) and her son Guille traveling to the big city to see the boy’s grandfather. Upon arriving, they not only learn he has passed, but that his billiard hall, 7 Siete Mesas, with seven French tables (i.e., carom billiards tables) is now in decrepit condition and that the grandfather had a number of outstanding debts. For Angela, the bad news keeps coming, as she subsequently is confronted by the police to learn that her husband has both disappeared and has a secret second family.

Faced with a panorama of bad news, Angela decides to stay in the big city and restore the billiard hall to its former glory. This includes re-assembling the hall’s one-time billiard team — now a bunch of gruff, ornery oldsters – to compete in the upcoming tournament with a chance of winning the prize money.

Tempers flare and tensions rise, but given the movie’s melodramatic predictability, the players are able to put aside old history and reconnect. There’s even a place on team Siete Mesas for the dead father’s crotchety girlfriend. Eventually, it’s Angela who must reconcile her past and truly come to terms with her father’s death (but not before ripping a number of portraits of him off the wall and shattering them on the floor – oh my!).

Billiards enthusiasts will be equally disappointed, as Siete mesas de billar francés talks about the sport much more than it shows it. Certainly, the title sequence left me hopeful, as black-and-white photos of carom billiards players in their prime faded in and out. This was nostalgia for the game of yesteryear. But, aside from some occasional three-cushion shots, which always impress me for their perfect manipulation of the balls, the present-day game never materialized. Even the upcoming tournament never actually starts, though there is a bit of surprise as to who rounds out the team when one of the players steals the winnings and goes on the lam.

Siete mesas de billar francés is mildly entertaining, and Ms. Verdú is powerful in the lead, though not as much fun to watch as she was in Y tu mamá también or Pan’s Labyrinth. But, given its accolades, this film ultimately felt like a table scratch.

Siete mesas de billar francés is available to watch on Amazon Prime.

Top 7 Billiards Tables Not For Sale

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Since 2013, I’ve been blogging about the portrayal of billiards in film and television. In total, I’ve discovered 313 movies, television episodes, short films and web series in which billiards features prominently – and that’s to say nothing about all the scenes with only a passing reference to the sport.

So when the opportunity arose to share my passion with the BCA Insider readership, I jumped at the chance. After all, the more billiards permeates our popular culture, the more people are inclined to play and love and invest in the game.  And, in the hands of creative directors and screenwriters, the sport can become entertaining, metaphoric, a medium for deeper conversations, and a palette to imagine the unexpected.

Take billiards tables, for example.  While there are hundreds of models, they adhere to a shared composition of legs, pockets, bed, cloth, cabinet, apron, rails, and cushions. But, within film and television, the rules are more lenient; tables exist, for better or worse, that we would (or could) never use.  Therefore, in no particular order, I present the Top 7 Billiards Tables from Movies and TV.

7. Get Smart – “Dead Spy Scrawls” (1966). If you were evil international organization KAOS, intent on intercepting US government secret communication, where might you hide your latest “decoding machine”?  As Agent 86 Maxwell Smart deduces, the answer is the belly of a billiards table. Knowing the location, Smart then only needs to pocket four balls simultaneously to serve as the combination to unlock the decoding machine. Can your table do that?

6.  Billy the Kid and the Green Baize Vampire (1987). Not only does this billiards musical reinterpret the showdown between legends Jimmy White and Ray Reardon as a grudge match between an aging vampire and a Cockney named Billy, but it also converts a gorgeous black marble snooker table into a transparent bedtime coffin for the snaggletoothed snooker sensation’s dead father.

5.  Silent Running (1972). In a post-apocalyptic world in which all plant life on Earth is becoming extinct, a group of scientists whittle away the day playing a variation of billiards that includes a computer arm player and a futuristic circular pool table. While the film’s shelf life was limited, its imaginings about circular pool have spawned mathematical debates within online message forums.

4. Goldfinger (1964). Maxwell Smart is not the only agent to encounter an unusual pool table. In Goldfinger, Auric Goldfinger, the arch-nemesis of James Bond, need only flip a switch and the reversible pool table reveals a miniature replica of Fort Knox, his future heist target. Fortunately, this is a different table than the one Goldfinger later straps Bond to, with the intent to laser his nether regions.

3. Hard Knuckle (1982). Imagine a dystopian world where one botched billiards shot means having to sever the top third of one’s finger. That’s the practical purpose of the “Knuckle Table,” a blood-crusted set of pincers hinged to each pool table in this Australian made-for-TV movie. Surprisingly, the threat of phalangectomy did not diminish the sport’s popularity.

2. Death Parade – “Death March” (2015). Created as a sequel to the short film Death Billiards, this Japanese anime television series has dead people participate in “Death Games” to choose their final fate. This galactic billiards table makes its debut in the fifth episode during a game of Solar System 9-Ball. Fortunately, no planets were harmed in the playing of this grudge match.

1. Beverly Hillbillies (1960s). Though I’m not sure in which episode the “fancy eatin’ table” first premiered, it is impossible to forget the Clampett family’s dining room table, which viewers all recognized as a billiards table. It was “built solid” enough to support “half dozen turkey gobblers and never sag a bit.” Best of all, the table came with “pot passers” and “meat stabbers” (aka cue sticks notched or sharpened for various culinary purposes).

So, the next time you’re discussing billiards table options, consider finding inspiration in these cinematic counterparts. Just steer clear of the Knuckle Table.  We’ll leave that one on the silver screen.

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This article first appeared in BCA Insider – BCA Holiday Issue (November 1, 2019).

Three Card Monte

Three Card Monte.v2Three Card Monte barely counts as a billiards movie.  But in oeuvre with very limited Canadian representation (i.e., The Understudy: Graveyard Shift II; Behind the Eight Ball; Manitoba Sharks; Hiccups – “Car Pool”), the decision to relax the definition for a little more inclusion from the Great White North seemed straightforward.  Unfortunately, the fact the film is also barely watchable has now led to some second-guessing on my end.

Released in 1978 at the Toronto Film Festival, Three Card Monte tells the story of Busher (Richard Gabourie), a gambling drifter, who begrudgingly allows Toby (Chris Langevin), a 12-year old orphan, to accompany him in his hustling and flimflammery, and builds a close relationship with him in the process.

Directed by Les Rose (Gas; Hog Wild – never heard of them?  Neither had I.), shabbily written by Mr. Gabourie, and starring a pack of unknowns and amateurs, the movie limps along across a too well-tread path of familiar tropes and clichéd two-dimensional characters.   There are two half-witted grease monkeys who chase Busher around Toronto seeking revenge for getting scammed in pool; a gaggle of equally dull-brained craps players who fail to notice Busher is playing with loaded dice; a loose hitchhiker who sleeps with Busher but is pulling her own con; and a well-intentioned hitchhiking friend who eats Twinkies and unwittingly lets a 12-year-old feel her up (?!). And, then there is Busher, who, for all his negative tendencies (e.g., lying, conning, hustling, thieving, drinking, having sex in front of a minor, kidnapping a minor, etc.), is portrayed as a genuinely good-natured guy, just trying to gain a little edge and get back on his feet.

Credibility is not the film’s calling card.

A cardinal problem with Three Card Monte is the complete lack of originality.  The film feels like a mishmash of – or maybe a paean to – superior works about the grift, specifically the movie Paper Moon (1973) and the book Billy Phelan’s Greatest Game (1978).  In Paper Moon, Ryan O’Neal stars as a Depression Era con-man who develops a partnership with a girl (Tatum O’Neal), who may be his daughter. The film had multiple Oscar nominations and won Ms. O’Neal a Supporting Oscar.  In Billy Phelan, the future Pulitzer Prize winning author William Kennedy tells the story of a young pool player and hustler who lives on the edge, making a living in Albany pool halls and card parlors.

(For what it’s worth, Mr. Gabourie won the Canadian Film Award – aka the Etrog – for Best Actor in Three Card Monte. That’s hard to believe until one is reminded by film critic Jay Smith that this particular award is “given by presenters no one knew, to recipients no one recognized, to films no one had seen.”)

Three Card MonteAs for the billiards, Three Card Monte begins on a promising note.  Busher enters a snooker hall and begins practicing on a table.  For viewers accustomed to seeing American pool on the big screen, the snooker table looms large and it’s a welcome reminder how different the game is.  Soon, two local bozos think they can make a buck off Busher and challenge him to a game.  They quickly lose their money, then their car keys, in a rapidly edited snooker sequence, consisting mainly of potted balls.  Tempers rise as Busher leaves, and the players vow revenge (though it was not clear if they were hustled or simply sucked and lost).

That opening scene sets up the whole film, as Toby allies himself with Busher (by racking his balls), and Busher (along with the voluntarily abducted Toby) goes on the lam to escape his post-snooker hustling fate. Unfortunately, though Busher is frequently carrying his cue stick and seems to be looking for his next sucker match, there is no more billiards; the subsequent hustles shift to craps and finally three card monte.  So much for that “hot cue” notably highlighted in the movie’s tagline.