The Players Club(1998)

SHORT VERSION:
When Ebony goes to a motel to dance at a bachelor party being held for Ronnie’s brother Junior, she ends up getting raped and beaten into unconsciousness by Junior, and Ronnie sees the aftermath and helps Junior get away. Diana and Blue later come by to pick up Ebony and find her in her state, and after (somehow) deducing that Ronnie and Junior were responsible for this, Diana calls the crooked cops Peters and Freeman and fills them in on the details while also pinning blame on Tricks (even though she had no hand in it).

As Peters and Freeman find and arrest Junior, Diana and Blue go to the Players Club and find Ronnie and Tricks, and Diana beats Ronnie bloody in the subsequent brawl they have. Diana and Blue then tell Dollar Bill that they are quitting and leave, and Peters and Freeman then show up and cuff Ronnie and Tricks, put them in their cruiser with Junior, and drive away. Shortly afterwards, St. Louis – whom Dollar Bill is deep in debt to – and his men attack the club, and the goons catch Dollar Bill and throw him into the trunk of one of their cars and take off. Moments later, another henchman destroys the club with a shot from an L.A.W. rocket launcher.

Diana graduates from college and becomes a news reporter, and she continues to date Blue, who is now a top DJ at a local radio station. Ebony recuperated from the assault and moved back to Florida with her mother, Ronnie and Tricks went to work at another strip club after they got out of jail, Junior is serving time in prison for Ebony’s rape, and Dollar Bill was never heard from again (having obviously been killed by St. Louis).

LONG VERSION:
One night, the club’s DJ, Blue (Jamie Foxx), approaches Diana (LisaRaye McCoy) as she is about to go home after a shift and asks for her phone number so she can take her out sometime, but she refuses to give it to him, telling him that she just broke up with her boyfriend Lance (Monte Russell) and there is a chance that they could reconcile. However, she does ask for his number, and he provides it.

When she reaches the door to her apartment, she gets approached by her obsessive customer Miron (Jimmy Woodard), who wishes to come inside and admits that he has been following her home every night. She is able to get in and lock the door on him despite his attempts to force an entry, but when she goes looking for Ebony (Monica Calhoun) intending to get her help in calling 911, she finds her in bed with Lance. Livid, she launches herself at Ebony, but Lance restrains her while Ebony runs into the bathroom and locks herself in it. Diana soon gets out her gun and chases Lance out the door with it, then taunts Ebony with some deserving insults. She then feigns leaving the apartment, and when Ebony opens the door, Diana slugs her in the mouth and orders her to pack up her stuff and get out.

Some nights later, Ebony heads to a bachelor party being held at a motel for Ronnie’s (Chrystale Wilson) brother Junior (Samuel Monroe, Jr.), having been goaded by Ronnie into dancing for the guys there. However, she had only agreed to come under the pretense from Ronnie that other girls from the club would be joining them, but that was all a lie; Ronnie was just using her to get out of having to strip for Junior’s friends herself. When Ebony arrives, Reggie (Ice Cube) and Clyde (Alex Thomas) come up to her and offer to finish what they started earlier in the film (they tried to take her home from the club one night while she was drunk in order to “run a train” on her, but Diana stopped her from leaving), but she turns them both down, and Ronnie escorts her into the bedroom to get changed just as the duo start to get confrontational. While she and Ronnie are talking about all of the horny men present and which of their fellow strippers will also be appearing, Ebony eventually realizes that she will be the only girl dancing tonight. After she has Ronnie leave so she can prepare herself, she calls up Diana while she is on a date with Blue and tells her where she is and asks her to come get her. However, Diana is still angry with her and has little interest in doing so.

Wanting revenge on Ebony, Reggie first has Clyde take Ronnie out of the room to smoke some marijuana in his car, and then he goes up to Junior and lies to him by saying that Ebony will let him have sex with her, claiming that he and Clyde both had sex with her in a single past encounter. Excited, Junior enters the bedroom while Ebony is changing and locks them both in, but when she resists his advances, he proceeds to brutally beat and rape her. The partygoers overhear this and react with disgust and disbelief, including Reggie, who apparently didn’t expect Junior to take things that far. They all leave the motel room just as Ronnie and Clyde return, and before Reggie departs with Clyde, he tells Ronnie to ask Junior why everybody is leaving. After Junior exits the bedroom and she asks him about Ebony, she goes in and finds her unconscious and bloody on the bed. She flees the motel with Junior, the whole while scolding him for his actions. A short time later, Diana – having had a change of heart – comes into the room with Blue to bring Ebony home, and after finding her in her state, they telephone for help. Off-screen, Diana reports to the crooked cops Peters (Faizon Love) and Freeman (John Amos) that Ebony was assaulted and raped and that Ronnie knew about it and left her lying there, and add that she is likely hiding out at the Players Club now (she also pins blame on Tricks [Adele Givens] as well, despite her having no hand in this). Peters and Freeman go out and quickly find and arrest Junior (though how Diana figured out Junior was the assailant is never explained).

We then see Diana, furious and carrying her gun, enter the club along with Blue and head down into the dressing room. Diana sees Ronnie and Tricks there and confronts the former with what she knows, but Ronnie denies everything. Diana forces all of the women minus Ronnie to leave by firing a warning shot into the ceiling, and after giving the gun to Blue and having him stand guard at the door, she initiates a vicious brawl with Ronnie that results in Ronnie getting beaten bloody. She comes out of the room to see Blue keeping Dollar Bill (Bernie Mac) and Tricks at bay and tells him that they’re going, after which she punches Tricks. Dollar Bill fires Diana and Blue, but they reply that they couldn’t care less and then leave his presence. 

Before they leave the club, Diana and Blue meet the arriving Peters and Freeman outside and tell them that Ronnie and Tricks are in there. They head inside and find and cuff the two women, then put them in their cruiser with Junior and drive off, with Dollar Bill cursing them the entire time. Just then, we see the drug lord St. Louis (Larry McCoy) – whom Dollar Bill owes a lot of money to – and his henchmen Brooklyn (Charlie Murphy) and K.C. (Terrence Howard) watching Dollar Bill from afar in their car. K.C. asks St. Louis if he and Brooklyn should go and get him, but St. Louis replies that he wants to get him himself. He soon enters the establishment armed with a large gun and orders everyone to get out, then he begins to shoot up the place while trying to get at Dollar Bill. Dollar Bill escapes out the back door, but he is met by Reggie, Clyde, and St. Louis’ other henchman The Doctor (Badja Djola), who throw him into the trunk of their car and take off. As St. Louis starts to leave in his car with Brooklyn and K.C., he orders K.C. to stop when they get a short distance away from the building and then asks Brooklyn to do something to make him feel better. Brooklyn responds by getting an L.A.W. rocket launcher out of the trunk and destroying the club with a single shot.

The next scene returns to the present day, with Diana standing outside the burnt ruins of the club. As she drives away from the place, she narrates that she loved the Players Club for providing a way for some of the girls to reach their goals in life, but she hated it as well for all of the girls it destroyed in the process. We then see Diana with Blue and her son Jamal (Oren Williams) at the shoe store she worked at prior to becoming a stripper, and they are visiting Ebony, who now works there and is still recuperating from her injuries. Ebony is servicing two strippers from Club Sugar Daddy’s, and one of them remarks to Ebony that she could not put up with her job, and she replies that she couldn’t put up with hers, either. The other hits her with the line “We just usin’ what we got to get what we want”, which were the very words that prompted her to start stripping, but she responds to it this time with “if that’s all y’all got, you don’t want too much”. Ebony returns to Diana, where she apologizes for not being able to make her upcoming college graduation due to work commitments, and soon the strippers demand her assistance again. Before she goes back to them, she and Diana say to each other, “Make that money, girl. Don’t let it make you”.

In addition to telling the audience that she is now a news reporter, Diana narrates what became of everybody: