No one slips quietly through the front door of "The Salon." They make in the air and strike a pose that says: "Stop everything you're doing, little This is because "The Salon" is based on a play, the old-school kind where room and a fourth wall. And not just any play, but Shelly Garrett's "Beauty Shop," that Valhalla of vivacious African-American comedies categorized by the It's easy to get dizzy from the multiplicity of "Beauty Shops," seeing that 2005, the same year the title was co-opted for an unrelated hit movie starring Queen Latifah.
There was also a would-be "Beauty Shop" the previous year that changed its name to "Hair Show." Oh, have we mentioned "Barber Shop" yet? We probably should, since the writer of that feisty male "Beauty Shop" and for the screen.
Given all the huffing and puffing that has gone into reinventing the wheel, it is little wonder that Mark Brown's retitled "The Salon" arrives as something of an anticlimax, its once-mirthful edge dulled by Like the sentimental play that inspired this film, the beauty shop owned by Vivica A. Fox's working mom Jenny is an endangered species, threatened by urban developers. Holding up against the decline of its withered Baltimore neighborhood, Jenny's salon provides its clients and eight employees with a The air in this salon can get pretty thick.
The token straight-guy white-chick clients gets grief from gal haircutters, who jump on them for stealing their men. One beautician fields rage from her abusive husband (Terrence Howard, in a listless cameo), while another takes punches from a client whose husband is having an affair with her. And everyone dumps on Halle Berry, who they claim won an Oscar for getting naked with a white guy.
People walk in, people walk out, people change the subject. When things get brought to his script for "Barber Shop," as if we were catching life in the act of happening. But "The Salon" lacks the oomph of that film, which benefited Entertainer.
In lieu of Cedric, we get the spirited Kym Whitley as the shop's give and take that occurs between live actors and a theater audience. Without that, "The Salon" meanders, its jokes and insults tumbling before us onto the 
THE SALON (PG-13). Another day in the life of an African-American beauty parlor fighting urban renewal.
Good-natured but curiously flat, a bottle of root beer that's lost its fizz. With Vivica A. Fox and a warmly appealing Kym Whitley.
Mark Brown directs. 1:32 (crude and sexual content, language and some thematic material). At area theaters.
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