Starring Queen Latifah, Alicia Silverstone, Alfre Woodard, and Kevin Bacon. Rated PG.

Few rappers have made the transition from hip-hop to Hollywood as gracefully as Queen Latifah. Her choice in film projects, however, has often suffered from a lack of quality control. For instance, she followed up a critically acclaimed role in Chicago with a starring role in the critically despised Bringing Down The House. Then after creating the character of Gina in the popular Barbershop 2: Back in Business, she took on Jimmy Fallon in the uncalled-for Taxi.

Beauty Shop, tailor-made around Latifah's Barbershop character, is not so much the third film in a trilogy as it is a spinoff that could potentially become a franchise unto itself. The good news is that Latifah's charm carries the picture; her Gina is fun and likable yet strong and earnest when necessary. As the film opens, Gina has relocated from Chicago to "Hot-Lanta", Georgia, slogging it out at a trendy downtown salon to pay the tuition for her daughter's prestigious music school. Tiring of her egomaniacal boss, Jorge (a camped-up Kevin Bacon with a see-through Austrian accent), Gina quits and acquires a ramshackle uptown salon inhabited by a motley crew of stylists. Hilarity ensues…sort of.

Arguably, the Barbershop films succeeded because they presented a black urban milieu with characters that all races could identify with. The new film is, sadly, missing integral characters like Calvin (Ice Cube) and wisecracking old-timer Eddie (Cedric the Entertainer).

We do get Alfre Woodard-who is hilariously right-on as a Maya Angelou-spouting, leopard print-wearing firebrand-and Djimon Hounsou (In America) as Gina's upstairs neighbour who is conveniently her lover, electrician, and her daughter's musical mentor.

In their apparent desire to sweeten Beauty Shop's demographic appeal, however, the producers have added too much vanilla to an already tasty chocolate recipe.

Bacon's extended cameos soon become tiresome (although the actor has earned the right to goof off after The Woodsman and Mystic River), and Alicia Silverstone is annoyingly out of place as a ditzy given a chair stylist in Gina's otherwise all-black salon. Additionally, Mena Suvari and Andie MacDowell feel tacked on as loyal white clients who bring their business to Gina's fledgling uptown enterprise.

Amusing but not amazing, Beauty Shop succeeds on Queen Latifah's charm, and her filmgoing subjects will likely give her this one. The producers, however, will have to try a little harder if they plan on rolling out a Beauty Shop 2 any time soon.