Disappointment for a huge fan!

The performances transcend the film's tropes, grounding it in characters that feel more complete than this subgenre often produces.

I wanted to like it more than I actually did... But much of the humor totally escaped me and I walked out only mildly impressed.

A movie that not only functions as a solid scarefest but a razor-sharp satire.

Hoodlum (1997): Dir: Bill Duke / Cast: Laurence Fishburne, Tim Roth, Andy Garcia, Vanessa Williams, Cicely Tyson: Well made gangster film that evaporates into a litter of bullets. It regards lower standards of living and hostile attitude. Based on a true story in the 1930's Harlem with a triangle turf battle in motion. Laurence Fishburne leads the patrol against Tim Roth and Andy Garcia. He is smart and tough but unable to balance his personal life with romance. Bodies pile up and nobody really wins in the end. The concept still holds interest although the screenplay grows repetitious and weary. Director Bill Duke does a fine job with fantastic art direction. This film successfully captures the period for which it addresses but perhaps a tighter screenplay would have been beneficial. Fishburne holds his own as a gangster trying to be the gangster and the romantic interest. This will not work to his favour. Vanessa Williams delivers a strong performance as his love interest who is questioning the lifestyle he is involved in. Roth and Garcia overact as the two other opposing gang leaders who will end up on the receiving end of bad luck. This is not terrible filmmaking but the screenplay isn't as ambitious as it could have been. It does succeed in present the period for which it represents. Its purpose is to create the reality of gang lifestyles but the screenplay has more bark than bite. Score: 6 / 10

Interesting film about the rise of Ellsworth "Bumpy" Morgan portrayed by Lauwrence Fishburn and the fall of "Dutch" Schultz portrayed by Tim Roth. My preference goes to the Dustin Hoffman version of "Dutch" Schultz in the more accurate rendering featured in "Billy Bathgate". "Hoodlum" falls short when they showcase Dutch being hit by his own henchman in the restaurant bathroom while in "Billy Bathgate" they get it historically right as Dutch's gang (five men) are wiped out in the restaurant by "Lucky" Luciano's gang. Hoodlum may fall short on accuracy but keeps the viewer on their toes as to what happens next. Probably one of the most accurate films I have ever seen was Rod Stieger's performance in "Al Capone".

You people are nuts! This is just atrocious film wrecking. The script reminded me of a mad libs where instead of a noun, they just wrote curse words and racial slurs. It felt like the creators were aiming at entertaining the homeless insane demographic instead of intelligent individuals who wouldn't see straight through this malarky. But I have a story with this film that made it worth seeing. There was 7 people in the theater when we stumbled into this car wreck of a movie, my three friends, two other guys a few seats down and an African American couple in front of us. I was so offended by this film's utter lack of cohesive character plot, goals and motivations, creativity, etc., that my friends and I debated with the strangers next to us in the theater whether we should just leave and play area 51, a game we loathed! I was actually worried that because I was white, maybe the couple in front of us would think we were a bunch of racist jerks for leaving half way through, because it seemed to be really pretending that it was a powerful Black statement. Then the AA couple started laughing every time Larry Fishbourne said "N***** pennies" and we stayed. Two thirds in, all 7 of us turned it into a MST3K episode. We were laughing at every other line, inserting show tunes at inappropriate moments and would loudly boo and call the actors names any time the pennies were mentioned. I never would have done this had the AA dude not started throwing Junior Mints at the screen. All in all, terribly wooden acting, eerily clean set design for the 30's, bizarre and frustratingly convoluted plot and lame ass action. But hilarious theater experience.

This became one of my favorite gangster films when I first saw it, and watching it yet again after viewing very dissimilar projects like the Martin Landau Joe Bonnano biography or the "Valachi Papers", the "Godfather" or "Scarface" (both versions), "The Untouchables" (either version) or "Public Enemy", I've become pretty well convinced that this is the 'ultimate' gangster film, perhaps the only film that can compete with Scorsese's "Goodfellas" for the claim to be the best and most representative film of the genre.What makes that especially interesting to me is that "Goodfellas" works by being almost obsessively realistic about organized crime - it is too much of a 'real life' to dismiss as pure psychopathology, yet clearly not enough of a living to want to throw one's self into it after learning something of its gritty details (such as the lack of any retirement other than a grave or a prison cell)."Hoodlum", on the other hand, is the quintessential Hollywood genre film - more the legend than the fact, but hoping the legend can make the case better than the fact. The central protagonist presents just the right balance of determination, ruthless violence, and moral ambiguity, including a softer side or undeniable richness and complexity. The heroes and villains are clearly defined; the justification for the heroes to find themselves on the 'wrong side of the law' is unarguable. The gangster film has long been a genre in which Americans could work through their worst fears of living in a nation of many ethnicities; it just makes sense that the perfect gangster film would be about African Americans - the one ethnic group that is still denied total participation in our culture.The period detail is excellent and the direction is solidly professional; so is the acting; in fact that is a major point in favor of this film, and all such films, that all the participants approach their work with as careful and as a skilled a professionalism as possible. They were clearly determined right from the start to make a good movie, and they did. Surprisingly, very few Hollywood films are made with this attitude, since it's assumed there that most audiences don't care. well this audience member certainly cares, and I both admire and respect the professional when it appears.Beyond the richness of its issues, the film is also very entertaining. Yes, it is violent; it is also humorous, romantic, dramatic, and even, at times, philosophical. Much like "The Godfather" (which is a bit over-long to my taste), "hoodlum" is a 'complete package' gangster film that will leave you with a sense of having experienced life a little deeper than if you hadn't seen it.