Ray Pride

Set on the South Side of Chicago, Tim Story's directorial debut is a good-natured, riff-heavy workplace comedy, playing on familiar African-American comic types, scoring best with Cedric the Entertainer's turn as the memorably mush-mouthed voice of impolitic experience. Based on a script by Mark Brown, who wrote and directed "Two Can Play That Game," this George Tillman-Robert Teitel production ("Soul Food") rises above that style of affable-but-sloppy ensemble comedy. Ice Cube is at his best as the cornerstone of the story, playing a disgruntled young barber who's inherited not only his father's business, but also his clientele and the expectations of the community. If that sounds dry, the comic dialogue runs to cheery vulgarity like "Ass is like money, you can never have too much." An affirmation as much as an entertainment, "Barbershop" manages to combine sentiment and raunch within the PG-13 rating, including an inspired use of the single f-word permitted in that phony-baloney MPAA classification, which brought down the house at its Chicago cast and crew screening. Of the dozens of faces on screen, Cedric the Entertainer, with a goofy 'do looking, outrageously, like abolitionist Frederick Douglass in an electrical storm, gets the best and most impolitic bits in this "country club" setting, coughing up one beautifully timed "bullshit" behind his fist like a hairball.

"Barbershop" opens Friday.

(2002-09-11)

Also by Ray Pride

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