(Spoiler Alert) If it wasn't for Jason Miller's smoldering performance as the troubled paranoid and eventually doomed L.A mobster Cooper the movie "The Nickel Ride" would just die on the screen as soon as the opening credits stopped rolling.
Playing a low-level hood involved in the storage of stolen mob merchandise, at a warehouse complex that he runs in the city, Cooper is no longer of any use to his new mob bosses. Cooper's bosses now feel that his old ways of doing things is just not cutting it in this modern era of organized crime.
After 19 years on the job and being the best at it Coop's days are numbered as the syndicated is now planning to have him retired permanently. With his immediate boss Carl, John Hllerman, feeding him this line of bull about how he's falling behind in his work and now his mob boss want an even bigger piece of his cut from his storage and selling business. Carl comes to an agreement with Cooper on his payoff to the head mobsters to be increased from $8,500.00 to just under $20,000.00.
Things just don't seem to be going right for Cooper senses that somehow he's being set up for a "Hit" and all this talk about him not coming through for his mob bosses is really a diversion to keep him from realizing that. They don't really care how his operation, or block, is going they just want him to have Cooper drop his guard in order to have him whacked and then replaced.
Cooper get a message, of sorts, when his friend Paulie, Lou Frizzeli, who manages boxer Tonozzi, Mark Gordon, ends up murdered because he couldn't get his boxer to throw a fight that the mob bet heavy on for Tonozzi to lose. Feeling he still has his "touch" with the mob bosses Cooper did his best to call the "Hit" on Paulie off. When he got the bad news about Paulie from the hoodlum who "Hit" him Bobby, Richard Evens, Cooper getting him alone on an elevator almost kills him! This convinced his bosses from Carl on up that he's not suitable in their new reconstructed business and has to go.
Being introduced by Carl to his out-of-town driver Turner, Bo Hopkins, who's always in Cooper's face and obnoxious to the point where Cooper has nightmares about him being the "hit-man" sent by the new mob bosses to do him in. Cooper tries to get in touch with an old associate of his Elias, Bart Burns,to meet him outside of the city at his country home in a desperate attempt to stave off the "Hit" that he feels that's coming. In the end Cooper sees that all his fear and paranoia had some truth to it with Elias never showing up. With Cooper and his girlfriend Shara, Linda Haynes, now alone in the woods Turner, in Cooper's mind, seems to be behind every tree and ready to finish him as well as Shara off.
Surreal and dark thriller that has a number of fine twists and turns in it but it's obvious from the start that the dye was cast and Cooper was to become history by the time the movie ends. There were a number of off-beat moments in the film that didn't seem to make much sense with a dream sequence involving Turner at Cooper's country home that to me came across like an alternate ending that was left in the movie by its director by mistake.
The actual ending in the film with Turner and Cooper at his office in L.A was also very hard to accept since it made the sly and methodical Turner come across unbelievably unprofessional as a professional hit-man.
