'Players' loses big

Ever since his impressive debut in "Boyz N The Hood," Ice Cube has made some questionable choices in the roles he chooses to accept. "Friday," a hilarious comedy co-starring Chris Tucker marked one of his better choices.

REVIEW
	The Players Club 1 star At Showcase

So when he chose to team up with the same group again for "The Players Club," one might have thought this was a match made in heaven. But because Cube wrote and directed "The Players Club," he has no one to blame but himself for the mess that is his directorial debut.

The plot is a twisted hybrid of "Showgirls" and "Striptease." It tells the story of a stripper with a heart of gold, Diamond (LisaRaye). She wants to go to a predominantly black college, while her father wants her to go to a "better school." Rather than bow down to her father, she decides to pay her way through college. When selling shoes does not pay the bills, she takes some advice from two customers and joins them as strippers.

The cast is rounded out with some of Cube's costars from "Friday." Bernie Mac is his usual funny self as the sleazy and ill-spoken Dollar Bill. He shares with Don King the ability to make up words like "perpitude" and to create new meanings for old words. A. J. Johnson (Little Man) plays the bouncer at the club, and takes comical beatings the entire film. Cube cast himself as one of the villains in the film and does a fine job.

The cast, however, cannot make up for the poor excuse for a script and the terrible performance by LisaRaye. She follows in the footsteps of Demi Moore and Elizabeth Berkley as being a bad actress in a horrible stripper movie. The film may have been

Courtesy of New Line Cinema Ice Cube chills as director of the drama "The Players Club."

salvageable if someone else had been cast in the lead.

There are other problems with the movie that do not concern LisaRaye. The movie flows like a Faulkner novel.

But stream of consciousness does not work well in the movies. The movie just jumps from one scene to another with very little continuity. There are some really funny, laugh-out-loud scenes, but they are few and far between.

Jamie Foxx thankfully comes to the movie's rescue toward the end. He appears as Diamond's love interest and club DJ, Blue. His ability to steal the spotlight from everyone else on the screen - naked or not - makes up some of the difference, but not enough. His talent does not make up for LisaRaye's lack thereof. No one could have saved the movie at that point.

The movie spends so much time trying to set up the story that all of the stories barely have enough time to be wrapped up at the end. Too much was crammed into the climax, but by that point, it didn't really matter.

Unless you need an Ice Cube fix, and "Friday" just won't do it anymore, you may want to avoid this stinker.

04-21-98