Barbershop 2: Back in for a Touch-Up

my rating: Nathan's rating:

The original Barbershop was one of those occasional movies that no one expected much of, but which managed to do fairly well for itself, both critically and commercially. It opened during a "slow" month, had a good dose of both charm and "message", and the somewhat controversial character of Cedric the Entertainer's "Eddie" (an aging fixture of the shop, with rather unorthodox opinions about leaders of the black community) helped give it some publicity. It was no tour de force, but an entertaining yarn about a young man (Calvin Jr, played with surprising depth and subtlety by Ice Cube) who discovers his calling to preserve the neighborhood barbershop his father left him.

Barbershop 2 is return visit. The main plot device is similar to before - this time it's a national haircutting franchise moving into the neighborhood and threatening to put Calvin Jr's shop out of business - and it rolls along in the background as a fairly foregone conclusion of how it will come out. Meanwhile, Ice Cube and Cedric do their respective things in the foreground. This time it's Eddie who gets fleshed out the most, mostly through a series of flashbacks to the 1960's showing the role Calvin Sr's barbershop had in turning his life around, and the rather dramatic role he had in returning the favor. And most of the cast of supporting characters are back, each getting some screen time to develop their own personal subplots.

All of this serves to underscore the main point of both films: the value of neighborhood businesses and the people who run them to any community. Which is oh so very true. In both movies the little guy wins, in the first one through some clever maneuvering, and in this one... well, just because Calvin Jr stood up for his principles. In reality, it doesn't usually work that way. Small "mom and pop" businesses usually lose to the chains and franchises, with their better marketing and discounted pricing.

Devout Mercantilists say this is just free enterprise working to give consumers lower prices and stockholders bigger dividends. That may be, but as the Barbershop films point out, there's more to life and to a community than can be put in a balance sheet. Just in my lifetime I've seen more local businesses than I can count vanish or get taken over. The bank where my sister works has gone from local ownership, to being part of a statewide bank, then a regional bank, then national, and now they're merging with an international "financial services" corporation whose name I can't even remember. They still sponsor local charities and such, but only because it's good PR; the original local execs used to do it because they personally cared about those charities and their contributions to the cities in which they lived.

The independent hardware store down the street is gone, having lost too much business to the chain-affiliated store a couple miles away, and the big-box retailers out on the strip in the suburbs. A CVS drugstore displaced several entrepreneurial shops (most of which never re-materialised elsewhere) and with is cutting into the business of a couple local party stores, whose owners do more than provide jobs in our community; they're part of our community. Without them, the neighborhood simply wouldn't be the same place, and it wouldn't be a change for the better.

This is the message that Barbershop 2. it doesn't belabor the point - chosing to focus more on the characters and some opportunties for just plain for-the-fun-of-it comedy - but it's the sort of depth that makes it (like its predecessor) more than just a generic wacky comedy.