Review: Barbershop
Genre: Comedy
MPAA rating: PG-13 (Profanity, sexual content, brief drug references)
Running time: 1:42
Release date: 2002
Cast: Ice Cube, Anthony Anderson, Cedric the Entertainer, Sean Patrick Thomas, Eve
Directed by: Tim Story
Related article: Ice Cube smoothes out edges in film

There is a moment in the big-hearted new comedy "Barbershop" when two of the barbers — the only white guy working in the shop, and a man who seems to want to be white — square off and nearly are ready to come to blows. But before either can throw a punch, the scene erupts into Marvin Gaye's irresistible "Got to Give It Up (Part 1)," and everybody — even characters not in the scene — begins to dance. It's as if a Bollywood musical suddenly had broken out.

I have no idea what that scene is doing in this movie — there's nothing else in "Barbershop" that looks or feels remotely like it — but the effect is electrifying. It transforms a bunch of colorful characters, who have been twirling around the story like the pole outside Calvin's Barbershop, into a group of people stepping smartly to the same groove.

The neighborhood barbershop has become a quaint antiquity in most of America, but in the slums of Chicago it remains a gathering spot of seething modernity, an urban salt lick with straight razors. This shop is owned by Calvin Palmer, who inherited it from his father, and his father before him. Calvin has a wife and a baby on the way, owes back taxes on his barbershop and has just been turned down by the bank for a loan. Looking at a picture of his father on the shop's wall, he wonders aloud, "How did you do this for 40 years?" Calvin wants out.

It's no wonder he has money problems. This is a barbershop with more people cutting hair (7), playing checkers (1) and selling hot items (1) than there are paying customers. The brothers who come to Calvin sometimes are more particular about how they get their cuts than about how they pay for them.

"Like how you did Ronnie last week," one customer advises Calvin. "A little off the top, long in the back but not quite a shag, slope to the left like Gumby, Eddie Munster in the front, a li'l Wyclef on the right." When the haircut is over, he runs out the door without paying. "That's why you can't have a business in the ghetto," Calvin notes glumly after briefly giving chase.

The ensemble cast is led by Ice Cube as Calvin and Cedric the Entertainer — one of the stars of "The Original Kings of Comedy" — as Eddie, the shop's old-timer with more opinions than customers. (These two have one of the movie's pivotal scenes together, and it's tempting to imagine how it might be described in the New York Times: When Mr. Cube tells Mr. Entertainer that he has decided to sell the shop to a loan shark, Mr. Entertainer replies that Mr. Cube's character "has no sense of history.") It's only after he makes his deal with the devil — and Keith David's loan shark is such a Faustian character he might as well have horns — that Calvin realizes his shop's importance to the community.

One of the most refreshing things about this movie is the way it gives free reign to the sort of freewheeling debate that actually rages in some barbershops over what are accepted orthodoxies right outside the door. Eddie, for one, questions the saintliness of Rosa Parks and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.

And when someone brings up the idea of blacks suing for reparations (which Eddie calls "respirations") because of slavery, the barber (played by Michael Ealy) who is a two-time felon and is hiding a gun in his locker makes a surprisingly impassioned speech about black people taking responsibility for themselves, at one point looking almost straight into the camera.

There is a subplot about a stolen ATM, which two thieves — one fat, one thin — drag all over the neighborhood. When one of them sets the machine down on a sidewalk so he can rest, a line begins to form behind him. This is an updating of the classic Laurel and Hardy film about attempting to carry a piano up a long flight of stairs, and though it has almost nothing to do with the barbershop, it's a wonderfully effective running joke. You can almost hear the Marvin Gaye music every time the cash machine reappears.