Ice Cube, already infected by the acting bug, went full throttle in 1998 with The Players Club, Ice Cube's debut film as a director. Previously, Ice Cube was an actor of snarling presence (Boyz N the Hood, Trespass). But The Players Club demonstrates Ice Cube coming into his own with an intense and vigorous style; violence and sentimentality curdle dangerously below the surface of every scene.

The Players Club is a raucous and electric strip club where the strippers work their bodies because the money is better than any job at the local shopping mall. In The Players Club, the club becomes a metaphor for the exploitation of black working women. In the film, the trick is to attain a safe psychic distance from how much a person is willing to be exploited. A novice stripper is told, "Make the money. Don't let the money make you."

Refreshingly, the film takes on a woman's perspective, centering on Diana (LisaRaye), a woman who longs to go to college and become a broadcast journalist, but finds herself with a newborn baby. After an argument with her parents, she has to go it alone. Unable to afford tuition by working at the local shoe store, she gets a job as a stripper at The Players Club, under the moniker of Diamond. Nervous at first, Diana is given a quick tip on how to preserve her soul while lap dancing for customers: "Try not to look at the customer. Just look at yourself in the mirror and dance real sexy to the music." Dollar Bill (Bernie Mac) owns The Players Club. He's a self-important buffoon given to wearing derby hats and loud orange jackets; he spends most of the time ducking Mr. St. Louis (Larry McCoy), a dangerous gangster he owes money to. The plot thickens when Diana's cousin Ebony (Monica Calhoun) also gets a job at the club. As Diana says, "Sometimes blood ain't no thicker than water and sometimes a family can bring you down faster than strangers." Where Diana draws a line between being a stripper and being a prostitute, Ebony jumps into the life headfirst. Diana attempts to steer Ebony back to the straight and narrow, but her own struggles intensify when loves zings the strings of her heart.

The Players Club is nothing so much as a 1998 version of the type of film Pam Grier made in the 1970s. Coming out at the same time as Grier's own Jackie Brown, the two films are like oil and water. Tarantino's film was strictly classicist in its adherence to '70s forms. But The Players Club goes for the flamboyantly baroque. Ice Cube never rises above the film's B-movie pedigree, and he doesn't try to make it a mannered homage. Rather The Players Club glories in its supporting player caricatures. Ice Cube utilizes loony flourishes that could have been extracted from an old Jack Hill movie: the outlandish cartoon villains and a brutal slugfest between two women. In fact, The Players Club is a compendium of blaxploitation film plotlines. There's the struggling young woman staking a job she doesn't really like, the descent into sex and drugs, the comic relief, the gangster subplot, the burgeoning love story, and the coming-of-age saga. Cube vibrantly mixes this unwieldy stew, adeptly cutting from one element to the other, keeping it all moving.

The film also offers a fine lead performance by LisaRaye. Her Diana is self-assured, intelligent and sexy, but never afraid to pull a haymaker or blast a gunshot into the ceiling. Pam Grier would be proud.