The gangster genre has slipped far from its Godfather glory, its violence having been domesticated by a cable-TV series and its venality exceeded by the corporate cutthroats on Wall Street. So while former Don Corleone Robert De Niro imitates James Gandolfini in Analyze That, the South Bronx drug dealer played by John Leguizamo in Empire seeks new life in the world of Enron. As Leguizamo points out in his relentless, cliché-addled voiceover narration, his Victor Rosa is a businessman like any other, providing a product (crack cocaine) for consumers and competing with other businessman for markets. His rationalizing is confirmed when he meets Jack (Peter Sarsgaard, whose sibilant yuppie charmer is the best thing in the film), an investment banker who assures Victor that he’s as "legit" as any of his clientele and suggests he get on board the stock-market bubble.

Subsequent events — his girlfriend gets pregnant, a rival thug fills him with holes, and one of his henchman accidentally shoots a child — persuade Victor to take up Jack’s tip and "diversify." But despite the hip-hop casting (Fat Joe, Treach) and the sultry soundtrack, Empire never rises above stereotypes that Public Enemy introduced and Brian De Palma’s operatic Scarface overdosed on. First-time director Franc. Reyes, himself a native of the ’hood, actually shows more wit and insight in depicting well-heeled Manhattan than he does in portraying the barrio uptown; unlike his hero, he’s more comfortable in the boutique than in the bodega. (90 minutes)