There have been some subtle changes in the neighborhood. Calvin (Ice Cube) is no longer reluctantly running the barbershop. He’s quite proud of his business and its history, but he still scowls a lot. Customers don’t avoid Isaac, the lone white barber in the shop. He’s become one of the shop’s sharpest cutters. Terri (Eve) isn’t so angry with men anymore. She’s channeling her energies in other directions. Jimmy (Sean Patrick Thomas), who was only cutting hair as a stepping stone to something better, is now working for local alderman Brown. Ricky (Michael Ealy) is still trying to shed his ex-con stigma. He’s studying when no one is looking. Dinka (Leonard Earle Howse) is still pining for Terri, but his fellow barbers are trying to turn his attention towards other ladies who are hot for him.

All these performances feel as lived in as ever, and the feel of the picture is reassuringly authentic. How authentic is the Barbershop franchise? So authentic that the first film did almost no business overseas. Verbal sparring about purely American issues without mindless violence and chases just can’t be translated.

One other change is that we’re given a better sense of the neighborhood. We meet more people in the neigborhood, and the camera zooms in and out of the shop up into the sky to show us just where we are.

Calvin’s neighbor is Gina, an ex-girlfriend who is running a beauty shop next door. Queen Latifah plays Gina and is included here as an extended promo for her movie, Beauty Shop, soon to be released and made by the same producers. Let’s hope that movie is as good as her performance and as much fun as the brief tour of the beauty shop. (The official Beauty Shop preview that ran before the movie was dreadful.)

One thing hasn’t changed: Eddie. Cedric the Entertainer, who practically stole the show in the first Barbershop, deserves the center stage he is given in the sequel. He is the funniest thing in this movie, as he expounds on just about any subject that comes up in the shop and in the flashbacks that show us why the barbershop means so much to him and he to it.

I only saw the original Barbershop once, but I liked all these characters. They stayed with me. I remember them and was eager to see what had become of them. These films have an authentic feel and a deep affection for the characters and the neighborhood. The language may be spicier and the community’s problems more threatening, but this barbershop brings out the same respect and warm community spirited vibe of Floyd’s shop in Mayberry. When Gina and Eddie go toe to toe and it’s all over, they make up so easily and quickly we know that what connects them is much more important than what gets them irritated with each other.

Like life in Mayberry, change is slow, but change is coming. The plot of Barbershop 2: Back in Business isn’t fancy or suspenseful, but it is compelling. Something is being built across the street, and at first Calvin, who knows the neighborhood could use some improving, is hopeful. His attitude is that as long as it isn’t “a liquor store or a titty bar” it will help. When it turns out to be a fancy franchise “Nappy Cutz” offering haircuts and much more, Calvin and his crew are threatened.

Barbershop 2 tries to explain the difference between urban revitalization and the less welcome gentrification. Calvin wants improvement for the people and help for businesses that have stayed with the neighborhood, not for his neighborhood to be overrun with outside owners who are finally figuring out they might be able to make a buck off the residents.

Developers want the locals to sell, and as one of Calvin’s fellow business owners says, “First, the money isn’t bad. And then, the money isn’t bad.” Calvin is offered special temptation, but, of course, eventually he resists.

The passing of time and the mixed bag of the term “progress” are illustrated in several fun quick-cut montages that chronicle the hairstyles from the late 60s to today. Then they do shoes, and then they do the skyline of Chicago. And it is the skyline that really demonstrates the huge changes that have happened over the last 30-plus odd years.

In the flashbacks, we see Calvin’s father’s distress when Chicago burns after the death of Martin Luther King, Jr. “We should be celebrating the man, not doing this,” he cries as he looks out from the shop at the burning streets. During the riots comes a moment when Eddie shows his best stuff.

Barbershop 2 isn’t as funny as the original, but it isn’t as unfunny either. There are no brothers lugging around a cash machine trying to break into it or other unfunny comic relief. The movie is uneven and choppy but still very enjoyable. It is more serious and somber about the importance of community and carries a valuable much needed message.

There are no direct political slams on any Civil Rights-era heroes in Barbershop 2: Back in Business like in the original, the kind of jokes that were so funny and so angered Jesse Jackson that he tried to have the film censored for its DVD release. The filmmakers politely declined.

There is a slimy, smoot- talking, skirt-chasing, over-dressing, bribe-taking jerk of a politician. Alderman Brown (Robert Wisdom) has a habit of spinning elaborate nonsensical verbal gymnastics which reminded me a bit of Reverend Jackson. So maybe the filmmakers are exacting a little payback.

They do rag on Bill Clinton, and its pretty funny. Clinton is open season for everyone, as he well deserves to be. And the scenes in the barbershop where they dissect everything else are completely hilarious, but I won’t spoil any of the jokes.

What I found most touching in Barbershop 2: Back in Business was its Biblical reference. Calvin gets scolded that he doesn’t have enough faith by a woman he loves and respects. He spits out, in jest, the famously shortest of Bible verses, “Jesus wept.” And she warns him, like any good Sunday school teacher would, that he better be able to explain to her why Jesus wept the next time she sees him. He does so with touching eloquence during the climactic showdown meeting where the aldermen are voting on the development project.