What a colossal mess. Vusi (Ice Cube), a South African exile for 12 years,returns to his homeland to bury his father. Since Ice Cube is apparently incapable of a convincing South African accent, he walks around sounding like a native Californian while other characters go, "hey, man, where's your accent?" as if that's supposed to explain it.

One can only surmise that Vusi lost the accent while studying for his doctorate in English literature, which, amazingly enough, provides him with enough money to rent a BMW when he arrives in South Africa. When he travels to Johannesburg to find his brother, Steven, he stays in the finest hotels thanks to the generous amount of grant money he apparently received to write his dissertation on John Milton's Relevance to the Post-Industrial Age ("none"). This isn't a thriller -- it's an advertisement for graduate school: "Rent Beemers! Stay in fine hotels! Live it up! Become a grad student!"

In Johannesburg, Vusi runs into Steven's strung-out girlfriend, Karin (Elizabeth Hurley), who, once she learns that Vusi is a graduate student, gives him the "screw me" eyes like she's passing out religious flyers at the airport. Vusi soon learns that Steven is involved in drugs and owes a lot of money to Muki (Ving Rhames) and that crack addicts can indeed look like runway models.

As the number of bullets unloaded into people increases, the coherence of the plot dramatically decreases. Addition seems to become a problem as Vusi claims to be $900 short of what he needs to pay Muki despite that fact that Steven has a good $2,000 laying around. Apparently the mathematics section of the GRE is of little concern to English majors, just as the GRE itself is of no concern to local henchmen, who badly fail the following test:

You're guarding the house of a local drug lord when two suspicious looking guys with big overcoats and conspicuously shaped packages ask to be let in. What do you do?

1. Kill them
2. Kill them
3. Kill them
4. Really? They're selling Amway products? Show them right in!