REVIEW: BARBERSHOP - In my preview a couple weeks ago, I ridiculously compared the new Ice Cube movie Barbershop to Smoke (dir. Wayne Wang), only with more jokes. Granted, they both center around a group of people, almost exclusively male, who hang out, share knowledge, and trade insults in traditional neighborhood establishments – Smoke in a cigar store in Brooklyn; Barbershop in, well, a barbershop on the South Side of Chicago. But a more fitting comparison would be the barbershop scenes from Coming to America, where Eddie Murphy and Arsenio Hall play multiple characters, lifted out and extended over the course of one day. Cedric The Entertainer’s character in particular, a seen-it-all, know-it-all barber named Eddie, could have been an extra from America. It's only too bad that Cedric, with his affected old man's voice and gray-ish hair, never really had me convinced he was an old-school barber -- just a younger actor acting like an old man -- which distracted me considerably from his jokes. Barbershop has other problems, chief among them a near disastrous beginning that has two (or three?) characters trying to steal an ATM from a neighborhood convenience store. The sequence is shot deliberately to keep the characters in the dark, so that we just hear their voices, because director Tim Story doesn't want us to know who all is involved in the crime. (One of the movie's subplots involves a two-time felon named Ricky, who Ice Cube's character, Calvin, has given a job as a barber, and whether he reverted to his criminal ways and helped steal the ATM.) The result is a chaotic, unintelligible waste of two minutes; it might be one of the worst openings to a good movie ever. Actually, the whole ATM subplot just should have been excised from the story completely. The movie alternates between the main storyline -- Calvin selling the barbershop his father left to him to a slimy "businessman" named Lester (Keith David), then trying to get it back -- and the two bumbling criminals who spend the whole movie trying, unsuccessfully, to pry open the ATM. Only a handful of the jokes involving these two made me laugh, and, on the whole, these scenes just distracted from the more interesting story of Calvin trying to figure out what to do with his barbershop, a place he has somewhat ambivalent feelings toward because it was his father's dream, not his. What ultimately saves the movie is that most of the dialogue in the barbershop, especially the in-fighting between an elitist, highly-educated barber named Jimmy (Sean Patrick Thomas) and the shop's lone white guy, Isaac (Troy Garrity), is quite funny. But what pleased me the most is that Barbershop didn't settle for the easy ending when it would have been so convenient to do so. As soon as Calvin learns that he has to come up with $40,000 to re-purchase his shop, I was sure the big finale was going to be one of those, "Hey, let's all pitch in and do a big fundraiser that will revitalize the community and get the barbershop back!" The cliched, sappy ending was sitting there with a big red bow on it, but the filmmakers chose a different ending -- one that is still positive, but more consistent with the overall tone of the movie, which is the tone that you get when two or more guys try to one-up each other with clever insults. They may be dissing each other, but a certain level of respect and comfort has to exist in order for the dynamic to work.

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