OxfordPress.com

Grade: C+

Verdict: All about how good Ice Cube and Mike Epps are together.

Details: Starring Ice Cube and Mike Epps. Directed by Kevin Bray. Rated R for language, violence and brief sexuality. 1 hour, 40 minutes.

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Review: Rapper-turned-movie-star Ice Cube, who's been packing 'em in with his "Friday" film franchise, tries out a new character in "All About the Benjamins" (as in Benjamin Franklin on a $100 bill.)

He's Bucum.cq. Jackson, a Miami bounty hunter who's looking for a career change. He'd like to open his own private detective agency, but until he finds enough cash, he's off chasing small-time con-artist, Reggie Wright (Mike Epps) whom he's already arrested three times. They run smack into the middle of a diamond heist masterminded by, get this, a Scotsman.

The stolen jewels are worth $20 million, but that's small change compared to the $60 million lottery Reggie and his girlfriend, Gina (Eva Mendes), have won. But Reggie loses the ticket while running from the thieves. So they team up. Bucum wants to beat the cops to the gems, figuring the publicity will help him get his detective agency in gear. Reggie wants his ticket, figuring that if he finds it, Gina won't kill him.

"All About The Benjamins" ("benjamins" being slang for money -- i.e., the portrait of Benjamin Franklin on a $100 bill) is what it is: an urban genre piece. But it is what it is in an engaging way. There are the requisite genre trappings: car chases, scantily clad hot bods, gunplay and a material whirl of yachts, Bentleys and expensive homes. These are to be expected, like a horse and a cowboy hat in a western, or a young actress half his age in a Woody Allen comedy.

What's less expected is that "All About The Benjamins," which the star co- wrote, is good-natured and refreshingly — comparatively? — clean. The gratuitous lewdness is kept to a relative minimum. The picture also has a sense of humor about itself. A little old lady, who turns out to be not what she seems, tells off Reggie by calling him Poop Dog.

The movie looks more low-rent than it should. Some scenes could've been lifted from a '70s cop show. And it sometimes stretches credibility far beyond the artistic lisence of even a genre picture. A complicated sting takes place at a deserted dog track where, somehow, Bucum and Reggie have eluded any lingering secuity guards, stole some employees' uniforms and even dug up a couple of greyhounds to send running around the track.

For once, the female characters actually have something to do, a rarity in movies like this. As Bucum's smart, feisty, little-sisterish assistant, Valerie Rae Miller is energetic, funny, and awfully cute. Mendes ("Training Day") invests her scenes with Epps with loads of snap and sass. Watching Bucum and Reggie work together, she demands, "What kind of partnership is this? All he does is handcuff you to things."

Even so, the movie wouldn't work if Ice Cube and Epps didn't work. And they do — much better than they do in the "Friday" flicks. The former is the cool expert who handles the gunplay while the latter is the con artist who handles the word play. ("You know we go way back, like four flats on a Cadillac.")

"All about The Benjamins" may be more genial than ingenious, but it gets the job done. And a Bucum-Reggie re-up is definitely in order.

— Eleanor Ringel Gillespie, (none)