'Barbershop 2' is almost as good as the original

Friday, February 06, 2004

By Barbara Vancheri, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

The barbershop is open for business again and this time, Eddie is riffing on Mariah Carey, the D.C. sniper, Michael Jackson, Kobe Bryant, R. Kelly, President Clinton, Monica Lewinsky, Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden, to name a few of his oh-so-easy targets.

	'Barbershop 2' Rating: PG-13 for language, sexual material and brief drug references. Starring: Ice Cube, Cedric the Entertainer Director: Kevin Rodney Sullivan

Eddie (Cedric the Entertainer) also shares detailed, indelicate information about his lactose intolerance with an unsuspecting commuter who insists that normally he's "very nice to black people."

It had been Eddie's comments about Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King Jr. that outraged Jesse Jackson and others when "Barbershop" was released in 2002. "Barbershop 2: Back in Business" knows what generates word of mouth and the more outrageous, the better, although Eddie doesn't go after civil-rights icons this time. He has other fish to fry -- and fillet.

"Barbershop 2" takes moviegoers back to Chicago's South Side, where the old-fashioned barbershop has been a fixture since 1958. A corporation is buying neighborhood properties and installing chain stores, including a salon called Nappy Cutz, directly across the street from the shop operated by Calvin (Ice Cube). As the movie opens, the franchise is a couple of weeks away from opening.

Nappy Cutz has a flashy Web site and reputation of being a customer nirvana. When Calvin and his fellow stylists break into the business one night, to check it out, they find a basketball court, oversize aquarium, imported German clippers and other luxuries the regulars across the street can only dream about.

Calvin's search for a way to survive coincides with Eddie's trading of insults with the beauty shop operator (Queen Latifah) next door, the arrival of a new barber (Kenan Thompson) who is related to Cal's wife, the ascension of the talented but egotistical Isaac (Troy Garity) and the tumultuous tangle between Terri (Eve) and Ricky (Michael Ealy).

Former know-it-all college student Jimmy (Sean Patrick Thomas) has left the shop for a job with an alderman who never met a photo op he didn't like. Eddie, meanwhile, gets all the best lines here, plus a back story about how he landed behind the barber chair in the first place. He also figures into the history of the place in a thoughtful, touching flashback.

The original "Barbershop" was funny and fresh, and while the sequel is sporadically hilarious, it doesn't advance its characters much or deeply explore its theme about chains muscling out the little guys. Just when you think the movie isn't taking the easy way out, it does, but in a perfectly palatable way.

Queen Latifah is getting her own spinoff, "Beauty Shop," so the movie doesn't spend as much time in the sassy salon next door as it might otherwise. The fire of a long-ago romance is barely blazing when it's banked.

None of this will matter to people who loved the first one and couldn't wait for the second and they were legion, judging by the overflow crowd at a preview. As soon as Cal flipped the open sign to the street, they were primed to laugh. And they did.

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