Whoever thought this could have been tons of fun’ Queen Latifah, Mena Suvari and Andie MacDowell in Beauty Shop.
Being a movie critic is hard work. Indeed, occasionally there are times when you see a good film, and others where you drink mule piss. Ideally, I would’ve spent my night at Sin City. However, if life were about getting what we wanted all the time, I’d be alone on an island with Maria Sharapova, watching digital cable projected onto the sky as my cabana boy Patrick Gavin serves me frozen daiquiris. But I’m a movie critic, and while Clive Owen cut off people’s heads and Jessica Alba danced in cowgirl hotpants (cowgirl hotpants!), I was across town, seeing Beauty Shop.
Beauty Shop, for those in the know, is a spin-off of Barbershop and Barbershop 2: Back in Business. In this latest installment, Queen Latifah is hairstylist Gina Norris, stuck in a dead-end job working in a salon for foppish European cartoon Jorge (Kevin Bacon, looking too recognizable for his career’s sake). When Jorge becomes too divalicious, Gina quits and starts her own hair salon.
The bulk of Beauty Shop is a series of soft-centered adventures fueled by limp gurl power, in which characters finish each others’ freestyling monologues, yell at each other and laugh at white people who have never eaten collard greens before. Adventures within the shop include Gina’s piano prodigy daughter learning to be herself, white girl Lynn (Alicia Silverstone) learning to be black and the boo-hiss inspector constantly visiting to create tension while people sit around talking about plastic surgery.
And what a set of co-workers she has with her. While it’s a fairly diverse cast of characters, one expects them to tear each other apart, or at least rip and crumble up Lynn. She’s played with an excruciating Southern accent by Silverstone, emaciated and pale, who’s been away from the screen apparently becoming Skeletor.
Also onboard is Djimon Hounsou (Amistad, Constantine) as the fi-iiine electrician who falls for the zaftig Latifah — although none of the other women are left out in the male sweepstakes. In Beauty Shop, it seems, every black man is a good looking piece of meat, or a criminal, or a good-looking-piece-of-meat criminal, while every white person is an alien or a moron.
Throughout the movie, I prayed for a nasty subplot, or for a third act revelation involving a serial killer. I desperately wanted the lecherous little boy following around women’s behinds with a camera to be hit by a car. Hell, I would’ve even taken a plot twist involving a multiple personality disorder. Instead, we get a series of minor, uninteresting conflicts leading up to a silly competition between Gina and Jorge that features a deus-ex-machinatastic resolution.
Beauty Shop, in its entirety, is simply weightless and indifferent to itself. This appears to be the type of film where you can tell all those involved had a good time filming it. Still, people could also have a good time while Jorge’s balls were being fed to wolverines. Even if it had replaced dwarfish Mena Suvari (American Pie) as a hissy villain with Jessica Alba in cowgirl hotpants, it still wouldn’t have been salvageable. Then again, I’m not the target audience, but when we’re talking movies that are as liquid hate as Beauty Shop, target audiences are the last thing in mind.
