Malcolm X—Ernest Dickerson made a permanent jump to the director’s chair, following his well-regarded drama Juice with a series of action and horror pictures, often with Black leads. Surviving The Game, his second film, is a particularly straightforward affair: one of cinema’s many riffs on the junior high English class staple “The Most Dangerous Game.” Homeless and hopeless following the offscreen death of his family, Jack Mason (Ice T) is taking his tattered life one cigarette at a time, until Walter Cole (Charles S. Dutton) reaches out to him with an employment opportunity. After proving his physical stamina, Mason is hired as a vaguely defined assistant to a hunting party led by Thomas Burns (Rutger Hauer), only to find, as most new employees of lofty game hunters do, that he’s their intended target. For that matter, even if Mason was reporting to a standard, non-suspicious cubicle job, the presence of Hauer, Gary Busey, F. Murray Abraham, and John C. McGinley ought to tip him off that he’ll eventually be hunted for sport. (The group’s pre-hunt dinner conversation hints that cannibalism might also be involved, but the movie fails to commit on this front.)