Beauty Shop: Review By fredtopel

Just when I thought MGM was going to stretch their franchise thinner than the plot of the last Bond movie, they come out with a spin-off that’s better than the franchise out of which it came. Beauty Shop has much smarter dialogue than either Barbershop film, a better story and better technique.

The film immediately reveals that it’s got some intellect at work as it plays with the double entendre of the word “moniker” pronounced awkwardly by a guy whose accent makes it sound like a racial slur. There’s a line comparing a credit card to playing the race card that’s almost poetic. The best a Barbershop movie ever got was comparing big ass women to women with big asses.

There’s still the beauty shop banter, enough to make you feel like you are listening in to the daily banter of hip southern girls, but it doesn’t try too hard. They don’t throw out topics that court controversy.

The original Barbershop was a story about selling the shop and getting it back within a day, plus the subplot about the ATM machine. Barbershop 2 had more going on, with a competitor moving in and a romantic subplot for Cedric the Entertainer. But Beauty Shop has the most coherent and effective plot.

In Beauty Shop, Gina (Queen Latifah) has to solve problems to progress the story. Buying her own shop is a problem, and she uses her skills to influence people like the loan officer. Getting customers, maintaining the shop, avoiding fines and just plain coming up with money deepen the plot. It may not be Memento, but it’s a story that makes sense. There are lots of classy reveals too, characters like the DJ effectively teased for the entire film.

Barbershop 2 drastically enhanced the visual style of the original to a degree that was too showy with the different colored flashbacks. Beauty Shop keeps it a bit simpler but still does a lot with essentially a single set. There are nice moving shots through small spaces, and simply shooting in a widescreen ratio creates more interesting framing situations. (Note: Barbershop 2 was also in the 2.35:1 widescreen ratio.)

Beauty Shop’s main drawbacks are simply inherent to the nature of the film. It is long as the story tries to give every member of the ensemble something to do. They could have used a few less hairdressers and tightened the pace.

They also try too hard to connect to the Barbershop franchise. Right in the beginning, they give you a close up on photo of Gina with the boys in Chicago to make sure you know this is the same character. Some of the dialogue feels like it comes from Exposition: The Movie. But if they went to the trouble of setting the story in a different state with all new characters, why bother connecting it? The film is self-contained, and all the Barbershop fans already know who Gina is.

Those problems are not too distracting though as Beauty Shop is good, clean fun.