The Shop Around the Corner: BARBERSHOP: THE NEXT CUT

It has been twelve years, but now the shaggy hangout vibe of the Barbershop comedies is back for a third time. It’s also the best one yet. Set in the same small independent black-owned barbershop on the south side of Chicago, Barbershop: The Next Cut gives up on being a movie and instead brings the charm as a big screen sitcom. This frees it up to be a comfortable location for staging sharply observed and warmly felt social commentary comedy, sparkling with smart sociological sentiment and compassionate character work. It’s written by veterans of TV comedy Kenya Barris (Black-ish) and Tracy Oliver (Survivor’s Remorse), who recognize the film’s strength is in making the barbershop a place we want to relax in, enjoying our fly-on-the-wall status as the various barbers, customers, and neighborhood regulars wander through. It’s a big-hearted welcoming movie with serious topics on its mind, but a light touch making it all go down easy.

The shop’s owner (Ice Cube, the series' nice center) is continuing in his father’s footsteps, making the establishment a gathering place for its employees and clients to shoot the breeze while getting their hair done. It’s a great location for a comedy, allowing a variety of characters to interact, talk out their differences, engage in funny banter, squabble and argue, fret and worry about the issues of the day, and find a way to work together. The barbershop is a stage for debates and riffs, parallel stand-up sets in progress punctuated by teasing chitchat. It now shares space – and rent – with the neighborhood beauty shop, which lends the proceedings an element of battle-of-the-sexes, but not in any reductive way. The result is merely one more outlet for a joking collision between various points of view, where the film draws its energy as an appealing clash of charismatic personalities.

The men (like old irritable Cedric the Entertainer, grayed and wrinkled by talented artists, and younger guys like Common, Lamorne Morris, and Utkarsh Ambudkar) and the women (including Regina Hall, Eve, and Nicki Minaj) have an interesting dynamic, dredging up usually unspoken resentments and deconstructing modern gender dynamics from surprising angles. The film lets them have their disagreements, finding common ground where it can and respecting their differences where it can’t. It’s fair that way, a safe space that allows them to discuss beauty standards, race relations, gang activity, gun violence, police misconduct, respectability politics, small business struggles, and more. It’s an amiable peacekeeping movie, not afraid to get serious when it needs to. The film finds a Chicago in pain, wracked with problems – homicides, poverty, broken institutions – people seem at a loss to fix. And yet there’s hope, positing that even small gestures of goodness can make a difference.

You can think of it as Chi-raq’s little cousin, and not because that’s what director Malcolm D. Lee is to Spike. Funnily enough, though it is less cinematically ambitious or angrily satirical, Barbershop: The Next Cut is a more consistent film, and no less politically engaged. It doesn’t take big swings, but it connects every time. Malcolm D. Lee is skilled with juggling tones and tracking motivations across a wide ensemble. (His Best Man Holiday, for example, is one of the better comic melodramas of late.) Here he weaves a deft dance of stereotype and insight, following not so much a story as it is loose strands of subplots woven together – romances, relationships, parenting problems, jealousies, business moves, and gang violence. He allows the characters to express a range of opinions, doubts, and conflicts, examining them in a casual, low-key, often-amusing tone well balanced with seriousness.

Though the look is sitcom bright and simple, there is heavy drama here. One dramatic subplot finds Cube’s son (Michael Rainey Jr.) drawing close to a gang leader (Tyga) who wants a new recruit. But there is also the lightest of light touches. Cut to J.B. Smoove as a smooth talking one-stop-shop with the kind of patter only he can bring, Anthony Anderson as a loud food truck entrepreneur, or Deon Cole as a daffy customer who seems to never leave, and we’re in a much sillier range. Like Black-ish, currently finishing its terrific second season on ABC, The Next Cut comes from a clear perspective, with great specificity to its humor and wearing a social consciousness on its sleeve. This animates and bolsters its attempts to present honest conversation in a way that keeps the comedy flowing without short-changing its important topics. The movie's appeal is best represented in the wheezing bluster of Cedric the Entertainer, whose elderly barber loves to mix it up with the youngsters and never seems to have a customer. (That memorably changes in a priceless scene in the end credits.) He just loves hanging out in this barbershop, and it’s easy to see why.

Once, Twice, Three Times a Cheater: THE OTHER WOMAN

The Other Woman is a light and amiable wish-fulfillment revenge comedy with all the tonal mismanagement that pile-up of descriptors suggests. Getting off to a good start, the film introduces us to a high-powered New York City lawyer (Cameron Diaz) head-over-heels for her new rich, handsome boyfriend (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau). He’s her first serious relationship in many years. Too bad, then, that he’s married. When she finds out she’s understandably hurt, but not as much as his wife (Leslie Mann) is. He doesn’t know they know, and certainly doesn’t know they then spied on him and uncovered a second unsuspecting mistress (Kate Upton). From there the three women team up to get revenge on this no-good sleazeball. At first they play pranks, like putting a laxative in his water or estrogen in his power shake. But they don’t just want him humiliated. They want him to hurt. So they target his most vulnerable part: his wallet.

Totally uninterested in making this a dark or biting comedy, the screenplay by Melissa Stack finds fizzy complications that are treated as a lark. This leads to some gross-out gags like a defecating dog or a man in a fancy restaurant having an urgent bowel movement (what is it with this movie and poop?) that are certainly gross and might even make you gag, but I didn’t find them too funny. Okay, that second one was a little funny, but seems out of place, because elsewhere the emotions of the women are triangulated for comedy and light drama. Their common goal includes shifting desires and expectations for each of them at different points. They’ve certainly become friends under unusual circumstances, so it makes sense they wouldn’t always be on the same page. The wife, especially, has her doubts. Sure, he was cheating, but she wonders if that’s reason enough to throw away their marriage?

That’s an interesting question, or at least could be. But Stack’s script isn’t interested in exploring that. It’s too busy alternating between bubbly and goofy. Director Nick Cassavetes (of The Notebook and My Sister’s Keeper) shoots the film glossily. Everything is brightly lit and gleaming. The surroundings are as rich and white as the characters – big glass-covered offices, spacious high-rise apartments, and gorgeous beach houses. But I suppose that’s part of the wish-fulfillment of it all. Not only do we get to watch three beautiful women plot against an awful chauvinist, but we also get to see fancy clothes and nice architecture while they do it. Everyone’s so well off they can drop everything and go to the Hamptons or the Bahamas on a stakeout. Must be nice. I mean, aside from the whole finding out you’re all being cheated on thing.

What keeps this sloppy script and sparkling studio airiness watchable and even at times enjoyable is the strength of the cast. The three women at the center of the plot hold it down with their likable chemistry and funny personalities. They’re all clearly in their acting comfort zones, relaxed and capable of wringing laughs out of the sometimes lame material. One of them actually sells the old looking-through-the-wrong-end-of-binoculars sight gag. That’s no small feat. Leslie Mann is appealing as a tightly wound housewife who increasingly spirals into a manic panic over her husband’s infidelities before finding the clarifying purpose of plotting revenge. Cameron Diaz is fizzy and sarcastic, able to whip up a plan of action and have fun doing it. And Kate Upton is awfully good at selling ditziness, even if her character remains only a happy, curvaceous blank-slate. Seriously, what does she even do? Where does she go when she’s not on screen? We’ll never know.

They aren’t exactly the second coming of 9 to 5, the three-women-take-down-dumb-guy revenge comedy The Other Woman occasionally resembles, but that’s not entirely their fault. Get these three characters in a scene together, trading lines with one another, and it’s all pleasantly enjoyable. Mann’s flighty worry bounces nicely off of Diaz’s wry cynicism and Upton’s airheaded charm proves a fine glue to hold the trio together. But the movie has less to say about female empowerment than you’d hope, keeping the ladies firmly in their stereotypes. The tone wobbles all the way to the end, mixing broad slapstick and blunt innuendo right up to the climax in which the comeuppance we’ve been waiting for is a bit too eagerly vindictive. The movie doesn’t seem to think very highly of any of its characters, even the side characters like a small role for Nicki Minaj that dilutes the snap of her rap persona. That's a factor in the mishandled mood and empty point of view - are we supposed to root for them or view it all at a satiric remove? - that make for a hard movie to embrace. I didn’t mind it too much, laughing at times and smiling a few more, but it’s so slight and forgettable it’ll probably play even better in the middle of a weekend afternoon on TBS.

Unevolved: ICE AGE: CONTINENTAL DRIFT

Scrat is a bushy-tailed prehistoric squirrel who desperately desires an acorn that’s forever out of his reach. He’s a wordless, frustrated figure of bumbling slapstick with a Looney Tunes style of elegance to the purity and consistency of his motivations and adventures. Like Wile E. Coyote, Scrat’s his own worst enemy. It’s his insatiable desire for the unattainable that drives his worst impulses past self-preservation, his every inconvenience made all the more frustrating since, unlike the Road Runner, an acorn can’t even knowingly outwit him. But as much as I love Scrat, he’s simply not a good enough excuse for Blue Sky, the animation studio owned by 20th Century Fox, to keep churning out the Ice Age movies which contain within them his antics, presenting them as half-connected scenes that run parallel to the main story.

Once again we’re back with Sid the sloth (John Leguizamo), Manny the mammoth (Ray Ramano), and Diego the saber-toothed tiger (Denis Leary), who first became an unlikely herd all the way back in 2002 in the good-enough film that started this whole thing. This time around, as ever, the trio finds that the world is experiencing a rapidly changing climate. Ice Age was about the coming Ice Age. Its sequel, 2006’s The Meltdown, was about a big thaw. In 2009, the third sequel left all real geologic history in its dust with Dawn of the Dinosaurs. At least in this new one, Ice Age: Continental Drift, Sid lets us know how ridiculous that was, saying, “It didn’t make any sense, but it sure was exciting!” And it was, I guess, at first, although by the time the dinosaurs were gnashing their teeth and chasing the characters to and fro I had already gotten tired of it all. I was tired of the series sometime after my second or third viewing of Ice Age, or maybe it was during my first and only time through the waterlogged Ice Age 2. The series sure has a way of making massive climate change seem like no big deal. Then again, that shouldn’t be too much of a surprise as the oil companies have been doing just that for years.

So maybe I’m not the ideal audience for Continental Drift, but then again, maybe it will mean all the more when I say that it’s adequate. It, like Dinosaurs before it, comes the closest to capturing the very low charms of the first picture. I sat there while the sound and color danced around the screen and though I wasn’t exactly involved in the antics, I didn’t hate it either. Though I thought for sure the movie was ending at it was only the halfway point, I still ended up getting a modest jolt of entertainment during the actual hectic climax. So there’s that. The animators, under the direction of Steve Martino and Mike Thurmeier, are certainly talented and they have this particular cartoon universe down pat. I like the color and personality of it all, with exaggerated movements and nonplussed anachronisms. (And need I reiterate just how much I enjoy our fleeting moments with the strong, wordless frustration of Scrat?) I just wish that someone involved (maybe Michael Berg and Jason Fuchs, the credited writers?) could have thought up something more than halfway diverting to happen with it all.

In this installment, the continents are rapidly shifting and Manny is separated from his wife (Queen Latifah) and teenage daughter (Keke Palmer). Adrift on a chunk of ice with Diego, Sid, and Sid’s cranky, senile granny (Wanda Sykes), the group is accosted by furry pirates – a monkey captain (Peter Dinklage) and a crew containing a saber-toothed tiger (Jennifer Lopez), a rabbit (Aziz Ansari), a seal (Nick Frost), and a kangaroo (Rebel Wilson) – who are a big danger despite and because of their knowledge of the way back home. Speaking of back home, Manny’s wife and daughter are leading to safer ground a group that includes a hedgehog (Jake Gad) who has a crush on the younger mammoth (how’s that work?) and a group of cool teen mammoths (where are their parents?) with the voices of Drake and Nicki Minaj.

This is all pretty standard family film plotting with little to these new characters’ personalities beyond sight gags and standard-issue villainy and little added to the old characters beyond the new situations. There are typical father-daughter disagreement-healing, self-esteem-crisis-solving, stereotype-refuting, family-togetherness-affirming plot threads running every which way through the movie in ways that hit every point on the moral checklist in uncomplicated family film fashion. There’s no imagination here, no chance to let the story build or develop in any interesting way whatsoever. It just clunks from plot point to plot point, hitting all of its rote emotional beats while that nutty squirrel blasts through every once in a while to keep things entertaining, even if only for a minute or two at a time. Otherwise, it all feels so lifeless, written and performed (with the exception of Sykes and Dinklage who are new to the series and so aren’t bored with it all yet) as if an enormous machine had spit out what it guessed humans like best about these kind of movies.

Playing right now at a theater near you, there are good to great movie choices for nearly every demographic. But say you’ve already seen all of those, or maybe your power went out and you need a cool place to sit for a couple of hours. You could certainly do worse than Ice Age: Continental Drift, an adequate movie that gets exactly where you think it’s going without anything too especially surprising or enjoyable (other than Scrat) along the way, but there’s nothing to out-and-out dislike either. It’s blandly harmless. Somehow, I don’t think I’ll get quoted in an ad with that.