Starring Ice Cube, Elizabeth Hurley, Ving Rhames, Sechaba Morojele, Eric Miyeni, Greg Latter
Directed by Darrell Roodt
Expectations: Low, it’s supposed to be pretty bad.
While selecting films for Ice Fest, it was tough to come up with titles in the Ice Cube filmography that would fit into the categories I desired. As Ice T has loads of low-budget action films, I wanted the series to represent a couple of “mainstream” films, as well as a couple of low-budget ones. That’s kind of my whole thing with this site, and Ice T’s films present a perfect opportunity to explore this in microcosm. Cube’s films don’t really fit in the same mold, so I was stuck picking All About the Benjamins and Dangerous Ground as the “trashy, low-budget action movies” of the series. Dangerous Ground is trashy and it feels fairly low-budget for a studio movie, but action-packed it’s definitely not.
Ice Cube plays a South African who — OK, stop laughing and let me get through this plot synopsis. Where was I? Ice Cube plays a South African who was sent to live in San Francisco (coincidentally very close to the Cube-favorite Oakland Raiders) when he was a kid to avoid being killed during the apartheid riots. Ice tells us through his opening narration, that he’s an African at heart, but he returned home an American. He comes back to South Africa via a credit montage with a poppy African song laced with ’80s keyboard synths that would be right at home opening up a Jean-Claude Van Damme movie. This built up way too many expectations of dope fights and action sequences I would never get, but regardless the song is so great that I made a recording and I present it below for your listening pleasure.