Bumpy goes back to work for the Queen, and when Schultz uses his machine of corrupt public officials to have her put behind bars, Bumpy takes over her racket and commences to wage full-scale war, becoming almost as brutal as the psychopathic Schultz.

Eventually the Bumpy-Dutch war plays itself out, inevitably for those viewers with even a passing knowledge of mob history. But it isn't just prescience that robs Hoodlum of its suspense; it's a shoddy, ill-executed script.

Director Bill Duke has covered the milieu of '30s Harlem (A Rage In Harlem) and the descent of a good, smart man into cruelty and criminality (Deep Cover) to great effect before, but this time out he's getting little help from his screenwriter, Chris Brancato, the writer of the comic-bookish sci-fi thriller Species.

As written by Brancato, Hoodlum is the kind of film where characters clumsily describe each other out loud, as in one of the opening scenes when Bumpy is being released from jail. As the Sing Sing warden prepares to sign Bumpy's parole he tells him: "You're different from most men here, Johnson. You read books. You play chess. You write poetry."

And sure enough, throughout the movie we see him do all those things, but we never know why he does them. Never are Bumpy's inner drives or passions revealed. Why did this vicious gangster develop these higher pursuits? Why did a man with such obvious talents set his ambitions on crime? We never know, and we suspect the screenwriter either hasn't a clue or doesn't care.

Similarly, the film's obligatory romance between Fishburne and Vanessa Williams -- a surprisingly talented actress in search of a worthy movie -- seems to come from nowhere. She is ostensibly attracted to his "poetic" soul, but if so, she's seeing something we aren't.

Hoodlum's script shortcomings are made all the more tragic by the fact that Duke has assembled one of the best casts of any recent film. Besides the always magnetic Fishburne; Roth, who has really made himself a force in American cinema lately; Williams; and, of course Tyson; the film boasts nice turns by such established character actors as William Atherton, Chi McBride, Loretta Devine, and Clarence Williams III. And Andy Garcia's portrayal of the boss of crime bosses, Lucky Luciano, makes you wish he had a whole movie to himself to explore his character.