In Beauty Shop, the character of Gina (Queen Latifah) from Barbershop 2 has moved from Chicago to Atlanta so that her daughter can study the piano at a talented music school. Soon, the feisty Gina has fallen out with snooty boss Jorge (played by a camp, Euro-accented, blond-wigged Kevin Bacon), who is not happy about Gina using her own hair products in his salon, so she decides to take out a loan and buy a shabby salon in a rundown part of town.

Cue an influx of stereotypical characters, because Beauty Shop, like its Barbershop predecessors, is more about interaction between people and a comedy of continuous line gags than about anything serious, or motivational. Of the characters, Alfre Woodard plays Josephine, a stylist quoting Maya Angelou to all who listen and even to those that don't. There's the token male, having to be heard in a roomful of women, and the country bumpkin shampooist Lynn (Alicia Silverstone), who is so desperate not to be seen as a white chick - she so wants acceptance from her black co-workers and the regular clientele.

Masquerading as a story is Gina's romance with a handily placed handyman (Djimon Hounsou), who lives upstairs - and wouldn't you know it, he also happens to play the piano; now that is handy! Then there's Gina's bid for business success, which, naturally, is threatened by Jorge's attempts at revenge.

If you liked previous Barbershop comedies, the eclectic mix of sex and race gags may just be appealing enough, providing you can put up with the obvious absence of the big presence of Ice Cube. Others, though, and I suspect this will be the majority, may prefer to wait and see it on rental, because if you go to the cinema, you'll either think the movie quite sassy and laugh at a hammy Bacon and a curiously-accented Silverstone, or you'll go in search of a story and instead find fairly flat direction and an absence of any real substance and you'll realise that yes, sometimes beauty only runs skin deep.