Beauty Shop Movie Review: By Adam Mast, ZBoneMan.com

Beauty Shop, or as I prefer to call it “Beauty Slop,” is a spin-off of the popular Barbershop franchise, and is about as exciting as getting an extreme make-over at Super Cuts.

This rather obvious comedy features Queen Latifah as Gina Norris (this character first appeared in Barbershop 2), a talented hair dresser who sets out to fulfill her dream of running her own hair salon after experiencing endless verbal torture at the hands of her previous boss, an egomaniacal hair stylist (played by the super-swishy Kevin Bacon - as Kato Kalen).

My wife and I are good friends with a hair stylist, and every now and again, she tells us crazy little snippets of gossip she hears around the salon. Sadly, none of the stuff in Beauty Shop is half as entertaining.

Instead, this flick more or less rehashes the concept of Barbershop. The problem is Beauty Shop doesn’t have the edge of the film that spawned it - by shear repetition this premise has become about as sharp as a pair of Kindergarten scissors. Sure, there are a couple of funny one-liners here and there, but not enough to sustain a feature. Mostly we just get boring chit chat and the occasional cat fight.

Queen Latifah can be an engaging performer given the right material, and thankfully her character is a little more textured than the one-line spouting blowhard of Barbershop 2. She does dial it down a notch here (something she would have been well-advised to do in the wildly idiotic Bringing Down the House), but all the likability in the world can’t hide the fact that Beauty Shop is nothing more than a little-off-the-top compared to the Barbershop films or more pointedly the wonderful banter on display between Eddie Murphy and Arsenio Hall’s collection of characters in Coming to America.

Kevin Bacon is funny - for about seven minutes. But, as you might expect, this one-note character wears thin enough to need an emergency comb-over before the second act. The rest of the film is populated by some pretty big talent (Alfre Woodard, Alicia Silverstone, Andie MacDowell etc.) but they are rarely given a chance to shine. Perhaps the biggest waste of talent in Beauty Shop, is Djimon Hounsou, a commanding screen presence whose part here is about as relevant as the role he played in Constantine. Still, this terrific actor manages to light up the screen every time he’s in frame.

The screenplay (or lack thereof) is the cinematic equivalent of a bad toupee. We get the male hairdresser who may or may not be gay - we have the cute little white girl who everyone criticizes for acting too black - and, of course, we have the token villain who will do anything to keep our hero from realizing her dreams. (His dastardly deeds are even caught on video - how’s that for familiar?). All this hackneyed fluff may have gone alot more unnoticed if the film itself might’ve offered up even a hank of originality.

Beauty Shop was quite obviously thrown together quickly. Like Barbershop, it features people talking for most of it’s running time. But unlike that surprisingly likable film, no one in Beauty Shop has anything interesting to share and it’s glaring lack of story telling smarts is about like trying to hide a bald spot with a can of spray paint.

Grade: C-

Adam Mast, ZBoneMan.com