Beauty Shop
Directed by Billie Woodruff
Written by Elizabeth Hunter, Kate Lanier, Norman Vance Jr.
Starring Queen Latifah
Release Date May 30th, 2005
Rotten Tomatoes Score 38%
IMDB Score 5.6 out of 10
Budget $25 million
Box Office $37 million
Ever since her breakthrough role and Oscar nomination with 2002's Chicago, Queen Latifah has struggled to find material worthy of her talent. Chicago has led to a string of awful movies like Cookout, Taxi, and Bringing Down the House, the latter being the only hit of the bunch and arguably the worst of them. None of these awful films, however, has dimmed the Queen's star presence. She is still a welcome presence onscreen even if her movies do her talent injustice.The latest example of Queen Latifah's star presence, the Barbershop spinoff Beauty Shop, is yet another bad movie where Queen Latifah outshines bad material.
In Barbershop 2 Queen Latifah introduced the character of Gina, a beauty shop owner who had the guts and talent to go toe to toe with Cedric the Entertainer's cantankerous old man Eddy. In Beauty Shop Gina has packed up her talent and attitude and headed for Atlanta where she works at an upscale salon and hopes to soon open her own shop. Gina's new boss is your typically effeminate diva stylist, Jorge Christophe (a nearly unrecognizable Kevin Bacon with a faux Euro-trash accent). Jorge constantly dumps his work off on Gina who earns the trust and loyalty of his clients because of her talent. However, when Jorge criticizes Gina in front of the entire salon, saying that he "owns her ass", Gina quits.
With the help of family, friends and an especially easy to please bank loan officer, Gina buys a rundown beauty shop in a questionable part of town. The shop comes equipped with a noisy neighbor/potential love interest, play by Djimon Hounsou, bad electricity, and a staff of oddball stylists not used to Gina's more upscale tastes. Among her new employees are the former owner, the Maya Angelou quoting Miss Josephine (Alfre Woodard, looking uncomfortable in this rare comedic role), Chanel (Golden Brooks) the requisite attitude problem or more precisely the bitch, and Ida (Sherry Shepherd) the dim witted one.
Thankfully also coming along with Gina from Jorge's is a talented stylist named Lynn (Alicia Silverstone, stymied with a bad southern accent), the one white girl in an all-black shop. Lynn is at the center of much of the film's uncomfortable racial humor. Back to the plot, Gina is lucky to have brought some of the upscale clients she met while working for Jorge with her to this new shop. Among those customers is the sweet natured Terri (Andie McDowell) and the bitchy Joanne (Mena Suvari).
The film's plot centers on finances as the titular beauty shop, as it was in the Barbershop movies, is constantly in dire financial straits. Everything is falling apart; the electricity is bad, and a nasty building inspector clearly has it out for Gina. That said, though, the plot is very much secondary to the interaction of this over-the-top group of characters, the plotless nature of Beauty Shop means that scenes linger longer than they should in search of a reason to exist beyond a weak punchline or dimwitted insult.
The one thing Beauty Shop has going for it is the star presence and charisma of Queen Latifah whose common-sense straight man never really gels with the caricatures that surround her. That is certainly not Latifah's fault. She seems prepared to connect with the material throughout, especially in her romance with Djimon Hounsou's character, Joe. Though not a natural when it comes to romantic comedy, Hounsou makes up for his lack of comic chops by being ridiculously good looking with a terrific smile.
Unfortunately, there are too many other things wrong with Beauty Shop for Queen Latifah and Djimon Hounsou to escape the orbit of this otherwise bad movie. Music video Director Bille Woodruff (Honey with Jessica Alba) is too caught up with quirky characters to give Queen Latifah the attention she deserves. Queen Latifah is radiant and funny and a director with more imagination than Billie Woodruff might have forgotten about trying to make Barbershop 3 and focused the film on Gina and her romance with Joe.
Had Beauty Shop simply been a romantic comedy about Queen Latifah and Djimon Hounsou beginning to fall in love, it might have worked. Sadly, the desire of the studio to clone a gender flipped version of the Barbershop movies, killed the chances of Beauty Shop of feeling like anything more than aq brain dead rehash eager to
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