Beauty Shop

In Beauty Shop, the character of Gina (Queen Latifah) from Barbershop 2 has moved from Chicago to Atlanta so that her daughter can study the piano at a talented music school. Soon though, the feisty Gina is falling out with snooty boss Jorge (played by a camp Euro-accented blond-wigged Kevin Bacon) who is certainly not happy about Gina using her own hair products in his salon. So the sassy Gina decides to take out a loan, ends up buying a shabby salon in a rundown part of town and intends to do it up to run her own beauty pad.

Cue an influx of stereotypical characters, because Beauty Shop like its Barbershop predecessors is more about an interaction between people, a comedy of continuous line gags, and far less about anything serious and a motivated story. Of the characters, Alfre Woodard plays Josephine, a stylist quoting Maya Angelou to all who listen and even to those that don’t. There’s the token male stylist having to be heard in a roomful of women and there’s a token white girl, country bumpkin shampooist Lynn (Silverstone), who is so desperate not to be seen as a white chick ; she so wants acceptance from her black co-workers and the regular clientele. Masquerading as a story is Gina’s romance with a handily-placed handyman (Hounsou) who lives upstairs (and wouldn’t you know it, he also happens to play the piano, now that is handy !) then there’s Gina’s bid for business success (will she make it, won’t she ?) which is of course threatened by Jorge’s continued bid for revenge against her striking out alone.

If you liked previous Barbershop comedies, the eclectic mix of sex and race gags may just be of appeal providing you can put up with the obvious absence of the big presence of Ice Cube. Others though and I suspect this may be the bigger majority, may prefer to wait and see this on rental because if you go to see it, you’ll either think it quite sassy and laugh at a hammy Kevin Bacon and a curiously-accented Alicia Silverstone, or you’ll go in search of a story and instead find fairly flat direction gives you an uneven mess, and in the absence of any real substance and just the odd good gag, you’ll realise that yes, sometimes beauty only runs skin deep.

Matt Arnoldi