Going into \Barbershop,"" I promised my roommate Liz that I'd say whether it was funnier than Sunday, when she pointed out while watching ""Dateline"" that Jack LaLanne has two belly buttons. Sorry, Liz, but Ice Cube and company have one-upped you. But ""Barbershop"" doesn't just outdo a freaky torso because of its humor. It also provides an interesting and well-crafted story that mixes it up more than any other movie of recent memory.
""Barbershop"" focuses on a day's goings-on in a southside Chicago barbershop. The shop is run by Calvin (Ice Cube), who inherited the family business from his father. The movie follows Calvin's internal struggle, as he sells the shop to a loan shark to gain financial stability, only to regret it when he comes to understand the shop's intangible value to himself and the community.
The movie simultaneously deals with the struggle between two opposite young black men, the college-educated one (Sean Patrick Thomas) and the one with the checkered past being given a second chance (Michael Ealy). Meanwhile, it chronicles the relationship struggles of the shop's only female barber (Eve), the love lacking from a young African immigrant barber's life, the white barber with black mannerisms and the comic crankiness of the elder barber (Cedric the Entertainer), all while following the aftermath of the theft of an ATM by two inept burglars.
Through the charismatic performances of the entire ensemble cast and the skillful direction of Tim Story, ""Barbershop"" manages to be much greater than the sum of its parts. The one good thing to come out of 1999's ""Black and White"" is that we all learned just how bad a movie can be when it tries to mix character development, social commentary, an ensemble cast, multiple storylines and issues of race and sex.
""Barbershop"" manages to deal with serious social issues, like the civil rights movement or slave reparations, without getting too preachy because it never dwells on them too long. On the flipside, it draws laughs from silly and slapstick humor without getting sucked into total farcical slop. The job of mixing up the moments and storylines is done brilliantly.
Similarly, ""Barbershop"" manages to defy conventional wisdom in its handling of the smorgasbord of characters. None of the characters are particularly original. This is an inescapable result of trying to capture the many varying faces of poor black America. But the result is appealing because of careful character development, strong dialogue, and handling of the mix with warmth and charm instead of having the arrogance to tackle really big issues head-on through comedy.
The cast deserves equal credit. Ice Cube approaches his character with great sympathy, ably serving as an anchor to a very diverse crew of actors. And while Cedric the Entertainer's hysterical rants don't top Eddie Murphy and Arsenio Hall's barbershop scenes from ""Coming to America,"" he made a fan out of me. Besides, we all know what happens when Eddie Murphy himself tries to take five minutes of hilarity from a previous movie and make a whole other movie out of it (remember ""The Klumps""?).
Eve has also grown on me enormously in the last month or so. Maybe I just didn't like her first album; maybe I die a little inside every time I hear a drunken pack of freshman girls singing ""Let Me Blow Ya Mind,"" but I like her song with Alicia Keys and I enjoyed her performance in ""Barbershop."" She handles the only challenging female role in the movie with charm, humor and presence. In fact, the rappers and comedian in ""Barbershop"" are so good that it's easy to overlook regular actors like Sean Patrick Thomas and Troy Garity, who are also strong, in addition to relative-newcomer Michael Ealy.
""Barbershop"" isn't a great movie, but it's a very good one and was worth 102 minutes of my time. Oh well, sorry, Liz. Maybe I should have reviewed ""Stealing Harvard"" instead.
