Beauty Shop

Review by Jason Gaston

Welcome to the world of Beauty Shop… a world where the booty joke never gets old, where white women are slack-jawed idiots and black women are closed-minded racists. A world where everything good about Barbershop is redone with chicks and suddenly and inexplicably made bad.

Hey, Queen Latifah is fun, but her personality can only carry a movie so far.

Beauty Shop is a spin-off of Barbershop… or at least, as I’m told, Barbershop 2 which I still haven’t seen yet. In it, Queen Latifah’s character of Gina quits her job at a snooty upscale hair palace run by Kevin Bacon who completely embarrasses himself playing a foreign hair stylist who doesn’t seem to know the first thing about hair. Of course... that's obviously how he would get a posh hair palace in the first place, I imagine.

Gina fulfils her lifelong dream and buys her own beauty shop in the middle of the projects and, of course, it's a dump compared to Hair de la Bacon. Still, Gina goes about bringing her old-fashioned beauty shop into the spotlight as her customers gossip about everything and anything.

Beauty Shop is a rather scattershot hodgepodge of scenes that look like they were strung together for a sitcom pilot. Sure, there is some funny stuff in this flick, but it’s overshadowed by the dull script and awful direction.

Aside from Gina, I really ended up hating everyone in this movie due to the script’s need to make everyone so flawed to the point that I almost thought that the black women in the shop were going to join the KKK because they were so viciously racist. If a white woman were to act that way in a movie, it would be protested and the entire film would be demonized, but when it's black on white racism... somehow that's not only acceptable, but it's also supposed to be funny.

And before I get the obvious and predictable hate letters from just speaking my mind and the truth, I hated Alicia Silverstone's character too… how could you not hate a character so horribly written and overwhelmingly annoying?

Call this one Barbershop Lite. The movie may not be great, but at least Queen Latifah is back on track after the horribleness that was Taxi.

Still, there's nothing beautiful about this flick. Nothing at all.