Review – Barbershop: The Next Cut

I really liked the first Barbershop (2002).  It’s a very sweet, funny movie with good messages about family and friendship.  Did it deserve a sequel?  Probably not.  Did it deserve to be a trilogy?  Definitely not.  But here we are with Barbershop: The Next Cut, the third film in the Barbershop series and, even though it didn’t deserve a trilogy, it is arguably the best film of the three.

With the rise in gang violence surrounding the neighborhood, Calvin (Ice Cube) and the shop, which has since merged with a beauty salon run by Angie (Regina Hall), come together to try and help the community while also having their typical banter about racism, politics, and pop culture.

Barbershop: The Next Cut has one of the best ensembles of the year so far.  We get our regulars like Calvin, Eddie (Cedric the Entertainer), Terri (Eve) and Dante (Deon Cole), the hilarious customer that never leaves.  We also get a ton of new faces, like Terri’s husband Rashad (Common), One-Stop (J.B. Smoove), the barber who can get you everything and anything you need, corny new guy Jerrod (Lamorne Morris), and Raja (Utkarsh Ambudkar), the only non-black barber in the shop.  And, we meet the women from the salon like Angie, ultra-feminist Bree (Margot Bingham), and the flirtatious Draya (Nicki Minaj), who oversteps a few boundaries when she starts flirting with Rashad which makes Terri skeptical.  Everyone in this cast is perfect.  Nobody misses a beat and they all have a moment to shine.  The Barbershop series has always had rich characters and The Next Cut is no different.

On a side note that doesn’t entirely have to do with the movie: I loved the feud between Draya and Terri.  Both played by female hip-hop artists (Minaj and Eve), and I saw it as almost a battle of early 2000’s hip-hop vs. current hip-hop, though I doubt that’s what the filmmakers had in mind.  I was definitely leaning one way and was satisfied with end result.  No, they didn’t have a freestyle battle or anything, even though that would have been awesome, but it was just interesting to see old school and new school hip-hop go at it.

This is most serious of the Barbershop franchise.  It is still very funny with great one-liners, but the issues brought up in the film are more serious than any before.  The main issue at hand is the gang violence in Chicago and the effect it has on everyone in the city, especially for Calvin, as he tries to keep his son Jalen (Michael Rainey Jr.) safe from the violence and the gang life.  I live near Chicago and hear about this violence nearly everyday, and this did everything Spike Lee tried to do last year with his sexist and racist travesty Chi-Raq by being insightful and compelling about a really delicate subject.  We also get great conflict between Calvin and Rashad over parenting, Calvin and Angie over what to do with the shop because of the violence, and of course, the importance of the shop and the importance of a community staple and keeping with tradition.

Barbershop: The Next Cut is an excellent movie.  It’s filled with rich characters, deep messages, and great comedy.  This is one of the biggest surprises of 2016 and also solidifies Barbershop as one of the most consistent trilogies ever made.

MY RATING – 3.5/4

Did you see Barbershop: The Next Cut?  What did you think?  Comment below or hit me up on Twitter @kevflix or on Facebook at Kevflix.