Notwithstanding the move uptown to Harlem, this covers familiar territory: the underworld turf wars of the Great Depression. It covers it at great length and not at great speed, and yet it can find no time to elaborate on the distinguishing characteristics of Ellsworth "Bumpy" Johnson as a thinker, a reader, a poet, and a chess player, in addition to his more normal résumé as an ex-convict and a mob enforcer. Nor on his unlikely relationship with a ladylike community-improvement activist. Nor on the present-day legacy of this gang-war pioneer. The movie simply has too much territory to cover. But it is fertile territory, too, and its fruits fall in our laps at the merest breeze. Laurence Fishburne looks glorious in his hats and coats and lip-hugging pencil-thin mustache. As does, minus the mustache, Clarence Williams III as an opposing-team enforcer for the encroaching "Dutch" Schultz (an out-of-control Tim Roth, whom we might wish director Bill Duke had slapped down long before "Bumpy" Johnson and "Lucky" Luciano took care of it). The clothes, the cars, the nightclubs, the slang of the period and milieu -- "It's curtains, Dutch. The jig is up" -- regenerate interest without warning, if only for fleeting instants. And there is no shortage of the genre's lifeblood: hot lead spat from coughing gats. With Vanessa Williams, Cicely Tyson, and Andy Garcia. (1997) — Duncan Shepherd
This movie is not currently in theaters.