“Barbershop 2: Back in Business” reopens a franchise that pleased us mightily the first time around: the gang from Calvin’s Barbershop on Chicago’s South Side.
For a while, everything seems pretty much the same as the 2002 hit “Barbershop,” but this time around the razors are a little duller, the clicks not as slick, the patter not as snappy
“Barbershop” was a movie full of life and sass; it had that special energy that flares up when a good movie ensemble suddenly connects with sharp contemporary material. In “Barbershop 2”–as Calvin (Ice Cube) and the gang cope with corrupt aldermen, gentrification and the Nappy Cutz national chain of Ultra-Afro grooming palaces–the laughs seem a little cheaper, less robust.
“Barbershop 2” isn’t bad. And, for a while, because almost everybody’s back and the tone is similar, this movie pleases us in some of the same ways as the old one.
The tonsorial ensemble members are back at their stations, cutting hair, strutting their stuff and talking trash. Badmouth Eddie (Cedric the Entertainer) is still busting everybody’s chops and making hilariously tasteless jokes. Blond Terri (Eve) still disses the boys. African Dinka (Leonard Earl Howze) still is looking for love.
Blue-eyed Ricky (Michael Ealy) still pulls Terri’s chain. Isaac (Troy Garity) still tries to act like the Eminem of the scissors trade. There are even a couple of lively new characters, including Queen Latifah as Gina, written in apparently to set up a future franchise picture called “Beauty Shop.”
Finally, there’s a new crisis bringing another morose expression and “why me” glare to the face of Cube as owner Calvin: that upscale Nappy Cutz opening up across the street. The Starbucks of hairdressing shops, Nappy Cutz is an obvious attempt to bust Calvin’s chops and steal his business; it’s run by another smart-aleck entrepreneur, Quentin Leroux (Harry Lennix), and backed by mellifluous but phony local alderman Brown, who has hired away one of Calvin’s barbers, Jimmy (Sean Patrick Thomas), to work the politico game.
“Barbershop 2” is not unentertaining, but it’s missing something–and it’s not just the spontaneity, zest and fire of the original.
This movie feels flatter, more complacent. One of the writers, Don Scott, is back, but his co-writer Mark Brown is absent and so is the original director, Tim Story. Story’s replacement, Kevin Rodney Sullivan, has an odd resume for “Barbershop.” Though he did well enough with the sleek but saccharine chi-chi romance “When Stella Got Her Groove Back,” from Terry McMillan’s novel, here he doesn’t fully recapture the rowdy spirit or comic bravura of the first “Barbershop.”
Neither the jokes nor star Cube is as keen. The emotion isn’t as raw. The story is more contrived and artificial. Even the seemingly foolproof Cedric, in his signature role as the badmouth barber with no inhibitions and the frost-tinged Frederick Douglass-as-hipster hairdo, has lost a bit of his edge.
When a fictional character acid-tongued enough to prompt disapproval from Jesse Jackson seems to get bogged down in sentimentality and romantic flashbacks, you know something has gone wrong. Eddie’s comic irreverence toward Rosa Parks may have aroused Jackson’s ire in the first movie, but he was “Barbershop’s” key comic character: the ultimate barbershop dump artist, the guy who acts as a comic safety valve, saying all the outrageous things nobody else can or wants to.
But this movie makes the evil-tongued Eddie too much of a softy. Do we really need to know that he was a `60s brawler whom Calvin’s dad rescued from the cops? Or that he saved the barbershop from a fiery riot and has been mooning for decades over Loretta, a smiley gal he met on the El? Why try to soften a character who makes you laugh so much just by being nasty?
Remember those deadly sequences in some ’80s Rodney Dangerfield vehicles when the standup champ of humiliation tried to squeeze our heartstrings? It doesn’t quite work for Eddie either. Sometimes it’s better to settle for no respect and lots of laughs. Like the movie’s fictitious Nappy Cutz, this new slicked-up “Barbershop” may cut some hair, but not with all the old sharpness and flair.
`Barbershop 2: Back in Business’
(star)(star)1/2
Directed by Kevin Rodney Sullivan; written by Don D. Scott, based on the characters created by Mark Brown; photographed by Tom Priestley; edited by Paul Seydor; production designed by Robb Wilson King; music by Richard Gibbs (additional music by Wu-Tang Clan); produced by Robert Teitel, George Tillman, Jr., Alex Gartner. A Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer release; opens Friday. Running time: 1:38. MPAA rating: PG-13 (Language, sexual material and some drug references).
Calvin ………… Ice Cube
Eddie …………. Cedric the Entertainer
Jimmy …………. Sean Patrick Thomas
Terri …………. Eve
Isaac …………. Troy Garity
Gina ………….. Queen Latifah
