In his second pairing with Bill Duke (Deep Cover), Laurence Fishburne plays Ellsworth "Bumpy" Johnston, a Harlem numbers racketeer whose activities bring him into contact with both Dutch Schultz and Lucky Luciano. A double-homage to the up-from-nothing gangster films of the 1930s and the us-against-The-Man blaxploitation films of the 1970s—with a good cast, a skilled director and a Harlem Renaissance setting—ought to have been a sure thing, but Hoodlum falls short, due largely to a poor script from novice writer Chris Brancato. (Someone really ought to make a crime film in which the wisecracking chubby sidekick doesn't get killed.) Despite the always-formidable presence of Fishburne in the lead, Johnston never becomes a character, only a figure of ballsy entrepreneurial ingenuity prone to mouthing action-film clichés. The film attempts to show the price of power, but the character remains so unchanging that it's never conveyed. Andy Garcia and Tim Roth (as the suave Luciano and the disheveled Schultz, respectively) simply aren't given enough to do, and Hoodlum's central conceit—that the numbers racket helped the black community more than it hurt it—is pretty difficult to swallow. A conclusion featuring a dizzying string of betrayals that leads to a confusing anti-climax robs the film of even cheap action thrills, making Hoodlum an almost thoroughly forgettable experience, albeit probably the only film in history to unite Queen Latifah and The Mod Squad's Clarence Williams III.