The Best Ice Cube Movies, Ranked

Given how quickly Cube took to screenwriting, and how prolific he’s been as a producer, it’s surprising that 1998’s The Player’s Club (which was a modest box-office hit for New Line Cinema at the time) remains the only movie he’s directed. 

The Players Club is a story about a young woman who takes a job in a strip club in order to put herself through college. Newcomer LisaRaye McCoy plays that role, but the cast is stacked with famous names — including Bernie Mac (Ocean’s Eleven) as the club owner, Jamie Foxx (Collateral) as the DJ and love interest, and Michael Clarke Duncan (The Green Mile) as a bodyguard. It’s well worth seeking out.

With a voice as iconic as Cube’s, you’re never going to go hungry in Hollywood — and yet, weirdly enough, only two animated filmmakers to date have made use of those bassy vocal chords. The first was Jorge R. Gutierrez, who cast Cube amongst the voice roles of his charming Day of the Dead movie The Book of Life. If you only have time for one, however, make it Jeff Rowe’s truly awesome Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem.

Co-written and produced by Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg, this 2023 animated reboot has all the smarts, humour and comic-book nous of that same duo’s Invincible — albeit with the added bonus of a sick Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross score. The voice cast boasts everyone from John Cena to Jackie Chan, but Cube’s work as the insanely evil Superfly might be the pick of the bunch. 

Is it too much to say that 21 Jump Street re-introduced Ice Cube to a new generation? Aside from supporting turns in Fast and the Furious knockoffs like XXX: The Return of Xander Cage and Torque (more on that one shortly), the actor’s ‘00s output didn’t exactly resonate with moviegoers outside of the US, but Phil Lord and Chris Miller’s hilarious big-screen reboot of the late-80s cop show (and its equally hilarious sequel) was a genuine smash hit on both sides of the pond.. 

The story follows two hapless detectives (Channing Tatum and Jonah Hill, with Cube as their combustible boss) who go undercover at a high school to investigate a new and highly potent drug. Like any Lord and Miller joint (The Lego Movie, Project Hail Mary), it’s a laugh minute.

As I mentioned above, if you like the impossibly glossy style of early ‘00s action movies like F&F, XXX or even Mission: Impossible II (again, shoutout Fred Durst), Torque is, in my opinion, that genre’s greatest hidden gem.

Seeing as though the plot is basically Fast & Furious with motorbikes, I won't bore you with the details, but I will say that almost every frame of this movie looks impossibly cool, especially from a Y2K-nostalgia perspective. If cinema has an answer to vapor-wave, this is it.

Personally speaking, I can’t say that I find Friday as funny as movies like 21 Jump Street, but given the cultural impact of this trilogy, and the fact that Cube wrote and produced all three (with a fourth installment apparently on the way), they deserve a lofty place on our list. 

A trio of outrageous comedies set in Cube’s native South Central, the Friday movies provided a kind of sweet spot between the realism of Boyz in the Hood and all-out satire of movies like Don’t Be a Menace in South Central While Drinking Your Juice in the Hood. If you are a fan of stoner comedies, this one kind of helped invent the genre.

There was a period in the 2010s when playing a central character in one of David O. Russell’s movies (think Silver Linings Playbook, American Hustle) basically guaranteed you an Oscar nomination.

Released in 1999, Three Kings came a little too early for all that heat, but it’s well worth going back to. Cube stars alongside George Clooney and Mark Wahlberg in what is essentially a comedy heist movie set in the first Gulf War. The indie filmmaker Spike Jonze rounds out the cast and Carter Burwell provides the score — come to think of it, I’m due a rewatch myself. 

As well as the hugely successful Friday movies, Cube can claim to have played a part in three other massively profitable comedy franchises; and while I can’t claim to be much of a fan of his buddy cop Ride Along movies or those Are We There Yet? things, I do think that Barbershop deserves its reputation as a lowkey naughties classic. 

Directed by Tim Story — who went on to helm the first two Fantastic Four movies — Barbershop uses the always-reliable High Noon narrative setup to great effect to tell the story of a jaded barbershop owner (Cube) who decides to cash-in on his business, only to realise its importance to the community. He then has until 7pm to try to raise the money to buy it back.

Four years after Boyz in the Hood (and yes, we’re almost there), Cube and director John Singleton reunited with Higher Learning, a tough, provocative and incendiary movie that shone a light on the challenges faced by Black students on college campuses at a time when no other filmmakers was going there. 

The main plot follows three freshman students (Omar Epps, Kristy Swanson and Michael Rapaport), with Cube playing a supporting role as a militant campus activist — exactly the kind of part he was born to play.

The best thing about Cube’s character in Anaconda is that the movie’s director, Luis Llosa, makes absolutely no effort to suggest that he’s anyone other than Ice Cube — hilariously, one of the character’s first lines of dialogue even nods (in endearingly clunky fashion) to the rapper’s most famous song.

The movie, if you’ve never seen it or have not seen in years, is another Cube joint that I more than recommend going back to — it’s basically 89-minutes of pure schlocky entertainment that boasts a big, janky-looking snake and some genuinely villainous turns from John Voight and a pre-fame Owen Wilson. Think of it like fast food Jurassic Park — low of sustenance, perhaps, but high on calorific fun.

With everything he’s achieved in the industry in the last 35 years, it must be a bit annoying for Ice Cube that Boyz n the Hood is still regarded as his defining role. And yet, there’s just something so emotionally raw and urgent in his debut screen performance (on top of all the usual Cube charisma) as Darrin “Doughboy” Baker — the kind of realness that method actors spend their entire careers only dreaming of.  

The film itself was, of course, nothing short of a phenomenon, with Singleton going on to become not only the first Black nominee for Best Director at the Oscars but also the youngest person to achieve that feat — he was, quite unbelievably, only 22-years-old when the film was shot.

Thankfully, the movie has also aged incredibly well — so if you’ve yet to see it and need a War of the Worlds tonic, there’s really only one place to start.