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Tough-talking Terri (Eve) and preppy Jimmy (Sean Patrick Thomas) return for the sequel of <i>Barbershop</i>.
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Movie review: Barbershop 2: Back in Business ****

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Movie review: Barbershop 2: Back in Business ****

Ever notice how your neighborhood, quietly, stealthily, and then all of a sudden, has come to resemble the background of an old episode of The Flintstones?

You know what I mean: So many big-box electronics stores and chain coffee shops and fast food chains and chain pet shops have moved in, that as you drive the streets of your hometown, the background just repeats, over and over - until you're certain that you've been seeing two or three of the same building facades and strip mall architecture styles fly by, in an endlessly repeating, dispiriting cycle of corporate logos.

My guess is Ice Cube hates this - how generic America is getting, how it's flattening communities and few people seem to care.

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I don't know the man, but I think I'm safe in assuming that he feels this way; and I thank him for bringing it up, and for having the brains and the guts to deliver that message - that outrage at what's happening to your community, and to everyone's community - and through the most seemingly innocuous, accessible means possible, too.

Barbershop 2: Back in Business is a surprise: It's not a quick cash-in or a sad attempt at finding old alchemy, but a far bolder picture than you might think, more ambitious but just as snappy and entertaining as the 2002 original - which itself was a heartwarming surprise about community and the personalities that tie a beleaguered, fragile place together, and how a small neighborhood shop front can become the town hall when the real town hall itself has long since felt far out of reach. It was about, in short, the real glue that holds society together, the kind often too epoxied, and too ingrained in our everyday life, for most us to appreciate or notice.

That first movie had the easy warmth and generosity of a big scoop of comfort food: Ice Cube (who is the star and executive producer of both films) came to realize that the values his father, who owned the shop until his death, had instilled in him had become his own. He's a self-contained actor, but you could see the shock of recognition on his face, the surprise his character felt when he realized the corny old idea that some things are worth sacrificing for had actual weight; and that his block on Chicago's South Side would be irrevocably different (and maybe not for the better) without him.

It was his Wonderful Life, and he was its Jimmy Stewart (although, to me anyway, Ice Cube has always resembled no one else so much as an extremely irritated Winnie the Pooh.)

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Barbershop 2 is a much angrier, scrappier picture - without losing itself in messages and forgetting to be very funny. Cedric the Entertainer returns as the wobbly, "semiretired" provocateur Eddie, and the picture is smart to just step back at times and let him go: and he quickly knocks out an uproarious bit about how the D.C. sniper was "the Jackie Robinson of crime" - a black guy who broke into the largely white tradition of serial homicide. No nasty comments about Rosa Parks or any other beloved Civil Rights-era figures this time: The targets are safer, but the insights just as cutting.

And yet as far as message pictures go, here is one with the courage of its convictions; it doesn't just hang a cause on the rearview mirror for decoration and glance at it between stops for a bunch of gags. It's about economic politics - and I'm sure that sounds really thrilling.

So let's just say it's about how the race to carpet bomb your city or town with recognizable franchises is sucking the soul and the character out of those places, and how no one is immune.

When a flashy strip mall goes up across the street from the barbershop, Calvin (Ice Cube) is initially pleased: His burned-out block is like dozens of others in Chicago, never fully recovered from the 1968 riots that erupted when Martin Luther King, Jr., was assassinated. He's happy to see decent, needed stores come to his inner city. But when it turns out to be the first Chicago location of a state-of-the-art salon owned by a hair styling chain called Nappy Cutz, that generosity turns into genuine nerves.

That's the hook anyway, and it's followed to a melancholy ending. What's most impressive is how the movie goes out of its way to give that story a historical context: We see how Cedric found the place, we watch him ride the El through Chicago in the 1960s; we watch how he made sure the shop didn't burn when everything around it did.

The rest of the crew members, the same old assemblage of African-American movie types, get less screen time. They see the threat to the shop, but they have their lives, and director Kevin Rodney Sullivan (How Stella Got Her Groove Back) follows each for a bit. Tough-talking Terri (Eve) is taking yoga to control her anger, and sneaking glances at tough guy Ricky (Michael Ealy). There's the lovable West African, Dinka (Leonard Earl Howze); and token white guy (Troy Garity, son of Jane Fonda and Tom Hayden). Preppy Jimmy (Sean Patrick Thomas) has left to assist oily local alderman (Robert Wisdom).

But we get Queen Latifah, in what, out in TV Land, would be referred to as "a very special appearance." The film's cutting to her next-door beauty salon always feels extraneous; it's a shameless set-up for her upcoming spin-off, Beauty Shop. But Latifah does manage a lovely, funny bit with Cedric where they toss insults, cutting each other back and forth, until they're bored and stuck, left with nothing but a mutual affection.

That occasional sitcom resemblance is carried over from the first film. Indeed, the problems of the original are the problems of the sequel: The characters tend to be schematic and routine; there's always too much going on when you want it to relax and just be good company. But that familiarity and franticness is also part of why it works so well.

There's a thin line between a sitcom and a stage play, and often Barbershop 2, like the original, feels as if it's a cross between a comedy revue and something tossed together by playwright August Wilson from his scrap notes.

This is a good thing. We sense the people behind the movie are attuned to language; even the sound of Cedric's confident mumble makes its points without ever quite being intelligible. We feel the music of this place coming together at times; in one scene, that snip, clip, and swish of barbershop sounds is noticed and recognized and then quickly dropped into the background soundtrack, into the orchestra of its everyday life, which is full of insults and jibes and the radio playing low in the back room.

Here is a movie that respects that everydayness, and finds it threatened, and rather than pontificate about fair trade and gentrification, gives us affectionate reasons to sit up and care. There are better films than Barbershop 2 in your own neighborhood at the moment, but few made with so much real love.

First Published February 6, 2004, 3:47 p.m.

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Tough-talking Terri (Eve) and preppy Jimmy (Sean Patrick Thomas) return for the sequel of <i>Barbershop</i>.  (mgm)
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