Beauty Shop a Cut Above

Gina Norris (Queen Latifah) has left the windy streets of her hometown Chicago for Atlanta, shifting her life to a new locale so daughter Vanessa (Paige Hurd) can attend a prestigious music school for young children. She’s taken a job in the upscale salon of snobbish Euro-trash Jorge Christophe (Kevin Bacon). Gina dreams of owning her own beauty shop and licensing her own brand of hair care products just will not die, even if practical considerations like rent and her daughter’s tuition make them close to an otherworldly improbability.

But not an impossibility, especially after Jorge makes a racial statement he shouldn’t have. Gina quits right then and there.  Even better, she convinces a bank to loan her the money to open a shop right down in the heart of Atlanta, taking Christophe’s favorite shampoo girl Lynn (Alicia Silverstone) with her. Together the duo inherit a whole mess of problems including a dilapidated storefront, unanticipated electrical problems, a gaggle of jive-talking employees (including a riotous Alfre Woodard) and a neighborhood that isn’t sure they want the first thing to do with her and the lily white assistant. Worse, the local inspector seems to have it out for them, sighting Gina for seemingly every mundane violation he can think of.

No matter, quit just isn’t in the former Chicagoan’s vocabulary and she’s going to make her beauty shop not just succeed, but thrive. With the help of some of her former big-spending clients from Jorge’s salon (Andie MacDowell, Mena Suvari), the assistance of a sexy piano playing electrician (Djimon Hounsou) who lives upstairs and the growing friendship and resolve of her staff, it’s all going to work out fine for Gina and her daughter. Goodness knows she wouldn’t have it any other way.

Beauty Shop, the female-centric spin-off of Ice Cube’s immensely successful Barbershop features, is wickedly entertaining. Sure it’s got a slapdash, almost thrown together sitcom-like feel, but that still doesn’t make it any less comically engaging. The laughs come fast and furious, and just when you think it’s going to step over the line into either banality or stupidity somehow Latifah and company deftly pull it back from the brink. It’s thin, Kate Lanier and Norman Vance Jr.’s screenplay is virtually nonexistent, and there isn’t a single thing that happens I didn’t see coming from over a mile away, and yet I still thoroughly enjoyed myself.

This is easily one case where the performers dominate so thoroughly they somehow make up for a weakly thrown together storyline. Silverstone hasn’t been this funny or shown this much fearlessness since Clueless, while MacDowell showcases a heretofore unrealized gift for physically self-effacing comedy that’s utterly endearing. But best of all are the girls, and boy (Golden Brooks, Sherri Shepherd, Woodward and Bryce Wilson), working in the shop. Unleashing an ever-evolving free-flowing cavalcade thoughts, ideas, putdowns, put-ons and slyly disguised innuendos, this bunch is so fun to watch and listen to I found myself wanting to make my way down to the shop and experience their zest for life firsthand.

Don’t get me wrong, that script I was talking about earlier is rather trite and goes absolutely nowhere. It doesn’t help that Bille Woodruff’s ideas on directing appear to be nonexistent; letting his camera sit idle while the actors do all the work. Suvari, as a whiny socialite infatuated with her breast size, and Bacon are hopelessly miscast, while Hounsou, as sexy and appealing an actor as there is in Hollywood, has so little to do he might as well not even be in the movie.

Someway, somehow, none of this really ends up mattering all that much. Beauty Shop is an utter joy, the performers having such a great time, the enthusiasm dripping from the movie’s rafters is borderline infectious. When the inevitable sequel comes down the pike here’s hoping the directing and writing team gets a makeover. But where it comes to the cast and their zestful exuberance, let’s just say that’s one coif in no need of a combover.

Film Rating: êêê  (out of 4)