Starring Ice Cube, Elizabeth Hurley and Ving Rhames Directed by Darrell Roodt Rated R, with profanity, extensive violence, nudity and sex Running time 100 minutes Jack gives this film a rating of 5 out of 10

(Feb. 13, 1997) -- South Central Los Angeles meets South Africa in Dangerous Ground, a cross-cultural action film that extends the Boyz N the Hood concept to another part of the world.

Ice Cube, the rapper-actor who began his career in the original Boyz N the Hood, here plays Vusi, a South African who has lived in California since he fled apartheid at age 12. In America, he's studying African-American literature in college and working as a drug counselor. (He's evidently been in the states long enough to lose all traces of an accent -- Cube makes no attempt at dialect.)

As the film opens, Vusi returns to the new South Africa to bury his father and to explore his roots. There he finds a new tyranny has replaced the racist regime -- a thug-and-drug mentality is flourishing amid newfound freedoms, and many of the nation's impoverished young are falling victim.

Among them is Vusi's weak-willed younger brother, Steven. Vusi's family tells him Steven left his rural village for Johannesburg and has disappeared. As family elder, Vusi accepts the responsibility to find Steven.

Only hours after arriving in "Jo-Burg," Vusi is mugged. His rental car, coat and wallet are stolen. "I can't believe I come all the way over here to be carjacked," says the Californian.

The attack is Vusi's introduction to a cocaine cartel that is terrorizing much of the city. At its head is a vicious gangster (played by Ving Rhames, in a Nigerian variation of the mobster he played more memorably in Pulp Fiction). Vusi discovers that his kid brother has become a crack addict, and owes a ton of money to the drug gang.

To help guide him through the unfamiliar turf of Johannesburg's dance halls, street gangs and youth culture, Vusi depends on Steven's girlfriend, a stripper named Karin whose own drug problems make her difficult to trust. She's played by English actress-model Elizabeth Hurley, working a bit too hard to shed her upscale blueblood Vogue image.

Though Dangerous Ground is co-produced by Ice Cub, the film was developed by its director and co-writer, Darrell James Roodt, the first filmmaker of the new South Africa to achieve an international reputation, thanks to Sarafina and Cry, the Beloved Country.

Dangerous Ground, in fact, owes its existence to the far superior Cry, the Beloved Country. While adapting Alan Paton's classic novel of the 1940s to the screen in 1994, Roodt decided to make another film about today's South Africa that would employ similar plot devices. The former work tells of a rural black preacher who goes to Johannesburg to try to find his wayward son. The latter work tells of another black man, originally from rural South Africa, who goes to Johannesburg to find his wayward younger brother.

But there the similarity ends. Dangerous Ground begins admirably and addresses honest concerns about the sort of growing crime that accompanies newfound freedoms.

Ultimately, it settles for a sort of gangsta-flick blend of violence and attitude.

While bringing a white character (the girlfriend) into a story about the country's post-apartheid era is admirable, she isn't given much to do until the finale, when it seems an afterthought. A few other elements also seem contrived -- especially Vusi's highway encounter with a parade of neo-Nazis.

The acting also is uneven at best. Contrary to his name, Ice Cube projects a certain warmth. He's got a future on screen, but needs more seasoning for a role of such depth. Both Hurley and Rhames are too strident, perhaps trying to generate more from their characters than is on the page.

In the early portions of the film, Roodt injects inventive visuals -- flashes of black and white, for example -- but that sort of creativity fades as the film rolls along.

Ultimately, Dangerous Ground makes a valiant but uneven attempt to transplant the sensibility of today's urban action films into another culture.