Beauty Shop: Movie & DVD Review (2005)

(Originally published 2005)

The comedy "Beauty Shop" stars Queen Latifah as a beleaguered hairstylist fighting the system and fighting the man. She's a widow struggling to raise her daughter while also making a go of it as the owner of her own beauty shop in an Atlanta ghetto.

The film is an offspring of the popular "Barbershop" franchise, with all signs suggesting it will feature the same biting social satire that made the original "Barbershop" such a smart, controversial hit.

But that's not the case here. "Beauty Shop" is so timid and homogenized, it could put a flop in your flip.

The film stars Latifah as Gina Norris - the snippy co-star of "Barbershop 2" - who has recently moved from the southside of Chicago to Atlanta. There, she works at an exclusive salon for the Eurotrashy Jorge Christophe, who is played here by Kevin Bacon in full mincing swish.

He is hardly the film's only stereotype. For instance, the movie's idea of black women is that they must be overbearing, obnoxious, castrating clowns ready to brawl or to sell a joke. Conversely, white people are predominantly square, awkward, hopeless. If this were satire, the movie might work. But "Beauty Shop" isn't satire. It's just lazy and unimaginative, with writing that's stuck in a rut.

The cast is likable, but squandered, with Alicia Silverstone lost as the dumbest of hair-burning hillbillies, Djimon Hounsou almost wordless as Gina's grinning love interest, and Andie MacDowell and Mena Suvari serviceable as members of Gina's wealthy, white clientele. They dig Gina's home-grown hair conditioner, Hair Crack, so much that they follow her to her new digs, thus causing all sorts of problems with Jorge.

This is Latifah's fifth disappointment in a row, and it deepens the divide between the outstanding work she did in her Academy Award-nominated performance in 2002's "Chicago," and her more recent work in such underwhelming duds as "The Cookout" and "Taxi."

When audiences love you, as they do Latifah, they can be enormously forgiving. But even Latifah can't afford to make many more films like this. "Beauty Shop" doesn't lack charisma and it does offer the occasional chuckle, but it leans so hard on its ethnic, gender and sexual stereotypes, it mines a comedy of no significance. Its situations are forced, the writing is trash, and as a result, it has the stink of a bad perm all over it.

Grade: C-