Dangerous Ground

Ice Cube and Elizabeth Hurley in the tale of a South African freedom fighter who returns home after 14 years in exile for his father's funeral. Apartheid is over, but now the drug wars are destroying his people...and his brother is missing in action.

An odd combination of consciousness-raising and run-of-the-mill action, Dangerous Ground features Ice Cube, mostly unbelievably, as a one-time South African native named Vusi. Vusi came to America at age 14 to escape police repression, and eventually reinvented himself as an American scholar and community-oriented volunteer. Called back to the old country to bury his father, Vusi discovers the new South Africa under Mandela, but also gets a snootful of the nation's surge in crime and drug usage. Sent to Johannesburg to retrieve a long-missing brother, Vusi allies himself with a coke-addicted stripper (Elizabeth Hurley) who knows the vanished man. The script and direction by Darrell James Roodt (Cry, the Beloved Country) seems to be serving various masters: viewers interested in epochal changes in South Africa, and viewers who want to kick back and watch a suspense movie about drugs, a hooker, and a nasty crime lord (Ving Rhames). The result is unwieldy, and Cube's thumping performance doesn't do much to bridge the gap. --Tom Keogh