Hollywood gangster movies have usually concentrated on the famous bad guys - the Capones and Dillingers. Hoodlum, which is set in New York in 1934, is about a forgotten bad guy called Ellsworth Johnson, who ran the numbers racket in Harlem.
Ellsworth, nicknamed Bumpy, was a different kind of gangster - he was black, and in Bill Duke`s almost admiring film, this makes all the difference. Bumpy and his all-black gang take on the white guys who are trying to muscle into Harlem, notably the arrogant, foul-mouthed Dutch Schultz, Tim Roth, who`s allied to a crooked Irish police officer, Richard Bradford. Even more important than Schultz in the scheme of things is the manipulative Lucky Luciano, Andy Garcia, who doesn`t want the boat rocked - after all, he`s got state prosecutor Thomas Dewey, William Atherton, in his pocket. But Bumpy won`t stand still and let Schultz invade his territory.
Hoodlum should have been a lot more interesting than it is. Lantern-jawed Laurence Fishburne makes Bumpy a dull character, and his romance with social worker Vanessa L. Williams only extends the running time. Tim Roth`s Schultz is an overblown villain, though Andy Garcia makes a real impression as the ultra smooth Luciano. Bill Duke`s direction has little flow or rhythm, Elmer Bernstein`s score is far too insistent, and in the end the movie`s little more than a series of increasingly boring, and brutal, shootouts. An opportunity wasted.
