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HoodlumBill Duke's drama faced an unjustified straight-to-video arrival in the UK. The story of Bumpy Johnson (Fishburne) deserved better. A hustler and opportunist, Johnson was the first black gangster to realize the financial gain of the numbers racket, which gave him a chance to graduate from 1930s America and the Great Depression. Uptown, the vicious gang leader Dutch Schultz (Roth) reaches the same conclusion, finding that liquor and enforcement rackets are not lucrative enough.
He targets the premises of Stephanie St Clair (Tyson) as a starting point, Nicknamed the Queen of Policy, she runs the richest outfit in town, and has hired a new enforcer: Bumpy. Gang war begins, with Johnson the initial victor, outgunning Schultz's mob and giving money to the poor, building his own personal myth. But both men fail to ignore another player - the capo di tuti capo Lucky Luciano (Garcia), who needs peace to prevail if his own empire is to stay intact...
Duke - a formidable screen presence thanks to his menacing tone and Ving Rhames physique - offers an unapologetic homage to the Corleones, by way of another Coppola ensemble, The Cotton Club. He also uses Fishburne, the Apocalypse Now graduate, to realize his vision of the antithetical hoodlum, offering intelligence and imagination to balance the brutality.
The director's previous work - from 'Hill Street Blues' to A Rage In Harlem - is revisited in terms of character creation and visual impact, with Chris Brancato's script painting the broad strokes ("I remember the days when you could get a guy hit for 40 bucks," laments Schultz. "We live in inflationary times," comes the reply). Hoodlum alternates between cool Blaxploitation thriller and Godfather-style crime drama, a contrary narrative that diminishes some of the intended emotional punch. But Roth, Garcia and Fishburne are satisfyingly menacing as the sparring adversaries, their dialogue as sharp as their suits.
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