It has been more than a few years since you saw this movie, but it is playing again at City Hall.

It is Number One against Number Two in a fight to run Honolulu Hale.

There is nothing in the City Charter that says Honolulu’s mayor and City Council chairman have to be at odds, but usually they are.

So in mostly petty ways, Council Chairman Ernie Martin and Mayor Kirk Caldwell are circling each other, throwing a few jabs.

Caldwell claims Martin is putting on the gloves for next year’s main event, the mayor’s race. Martin is not denying that he is interested, but won’t say anything definite.

But consider the level of the Martin and Caldwell trash talk as reported by Hawaii Public Radio.

Here’s Martin on Caldwell never asking for funding for city projects:

“As important as he felt these issues were, he never once talked to me. He never called me, offered to share with me. We attend various social functions, ground-breaking events — never mentioned this as an area that needed my attention.”

Here’s Caldwell on a relationship going sour:

“When I became mayor, I had a standing lunch meeting every other week, and after a couple of months he stopped coming. I asked a few times and when he didn’t come, I took it off my calendar.”

Along the way, there has been some hissing about Caldwell letting the Council-passed city budget becoming law without his signature because the Council was giving money for its own homeless program advisers but not giving to Caldwell’s homeless programs advisers.

These two are amateurs. The movie we want to watch is “Frank Fasi vs. All Councils.”

During his first term, Fasi went immediately for the nuclear option and tried to cut the Council completely out of the budget. That didn’t work — you have to fund the Council — but it set the tone for the relationship.

“Everybody who gets elected thinks they are the boss,” recalls 14-year Council veteran and former Council Chairwoman Marilyn Bornhorst, who unsuccessfully ran for mayor against Fasi. “The mayor is the boss. You can pass any resolution you want, but the mayor can enforce it or not.

“The natural tension is supposed to be that the Council makes policy and the mayor enforces it,” Bornhorst, a Democrat, said in an interview. “But the mayor does all kinds of other things. So they are not equal.”

Warring Fasi refused to speak with Republican former Councilman John Henry Felix for three months after Felix voted against a Fasi-sponsored transit plan, until one day Fasi told him “I forgive you.”

“Frank had his battles with the Council, but he managed to work with them. We had great differences,” Felix said in an interview, recalling it once took three tries to override a Fasi veto.

When Jeremy Harris was mayor, Felix said, the situation became so tense that as budget chairman, he just sliced off all of Harris’ deputy director positions.

“Jeremy was pretty opinionated and he wanted everything and I had problems with him. When I temporarily unfunded all his deputies, he went bananas. That really shook him up,” Felix said.

Bornhorst, 88 and retired, declined to comment on today’s Martin-Caldwell tiffs, but Felix, 85 and still working, said he is impressed with Martin.

“He is low-key and intellectual. Very thoughtful, but he has some work to do to appear more likeable,” Felix advised.

Still, both Caldwell and Martin have a way to go before they could co-star in a movie with Fasi.

Richard Borreca writes on politics on Sundays, Tuesdays and Fridays. Reach him at rborreca@staradvertiser.com.