Ice Cube, the masterclass chubby rap artiste who has carved a small niche in the movie world thanks to outings in the impressive Boyz N The Hood, and the sporadically amusing Friday, here gives the action genre another go. Bad move, as it happens.
For, having left South Central LA behind, Cube relies on disbelief suspended so high it's walking the big top tightrope. He is Vusi, a wealthy doctor of African literature returning to his native village for the first time since he was whisked to San Francisco in his mid-teens to avoid South Africa's seething rise to offical racial equality. A world apart culturally (he drives a red BMW and sports designer togs), Vusi buries his father and then - at his mother's behest - heads to Jo'burg in search of his brother, scowling his way through a series of near-misses after hooking up with his sibling's spaced out stripper girlfriend (yes indeed, Liz Hurley).
The obvious intent of crusading director Roodt - a politically impassioned drama of an unstable country stymied by enduring racial divisions - is entirely scuppered by colossal silliness and plain ineptitude. Hurley's vowel-mangling, drugged-up tart is a work of unintentional comic genius, and Rhames' late appearance as the football-obsessed, Nigerian drug lord - spouting laughable guff about the English being the bully-boys of European soccer, while sucking a chicken's foot and trying to best Hurley's nomadic accent, is cinema's least convincing villain yet.