On a cold winter Saturday in Chicago in year 2002, Calvin Palmer, Jr. (Ice Cube) decides he has had enough of trying to keep open the barbershop his father handed down to him after running it for 40 years. Calvin has been running the shop for 2 years. He cannot borrow enough money from Bank Manager (Lorenzo Clemons) to keep the place open (the bank will foreclose on the shop if he doesn't pay the property taxes), it is not bringing in enough revenue, and he is more interested in coming up with get-rich-quick schemes to bring in easy money. Without telling his employees or the customers, Calvin sells his barbershop to a greedy loan shark named Lester Wallace (Keith David), who lies about keeping the place the same and secretly plans to turn the place into a strip club. Calvin's plan is to invest the proceeds into creating recording studio & play in the big leagues of the music industry. When his wife Jennifer (Jazsmin Lewis) finds out, she points out that the business was never under debt until Calvin started borrowing money to finance his schemes including a failed T-shirt company, and herbal life vitamins. Jennifer is pregnant and is expected to deliver shortly. The staff at the shop includes Eddie Walker (Cedric the Entertainer), Ricky (who carries a weapon in his backpack), Terri Jones (Eve) (who finds that her boyfriend Kevin (Jason Winston George) is cheating on her), Jimmy James (Sean Patrick Thomas), Isaac Rosenberg (Troy Garity) (who is white, but acts like an African American) and others. Prior to this, two wannabe thugs, JD (Anthony Anderson) and his best friend Billy (Lahmard Tate), steal an ATM from a convenience store. Due to Billy's clumsiness the thugs end up damaging the convenience store bu driving their pick-up truck right through its front facade. They tie an iron chain around the ATM and pull with the brute force of the pick-up truck. During the attempt, the truck's rear fender detaches and falls inside the store, which neither Billy nor JD notices. Detective Williams (Tom Wright) comes by the shop the following morning to interrogate Ricky as he has a criminal past and is a 2 time felon. Williams warns that he has the CCTV footage from the camera at the convenience store and in a few hours he will know the truth. The barbershop is a focal point for the community where people gather and exchange good vibes and humor. They take the machine back to Billy's place and they spend all day trying to pry it open. Calvin says words of encouragement to the convenience store owner Samir (Parvesh Cheena), which helps Samir & deepens his resolve to keep the shop open & continue serving the community. Samir tells Calvin that the ATM machine was brand new & had no cash, but the machine itself is quite valuable & banks give $ 50K reward for returning it. After spending a day at work and realizing just how vital the barbershop is to the surrounding community & everyone who works there, Calvin rethinks his decision and tries to get his shop back, only to find out Wallace wants double the $20,000 he paid Calvin to give the shop back, and before 7 P.M. Meanwhile JD & Billy keep having issues in hiding the ATM machine as Billy keeps messing up & keeps on increasing the visibility & attracting attention to himself & the machine. Now Calvin has only a scant few hours to try to raise enough money to save the shop. After he admits to the employees that he sold the barber shop and that it would be closing at the end of the day, Chicago police come in and arrests one of the barbers named Ricky (Michael Ealy). Ricky was arrested after being accused of driving his pickup truck into a nearby market to steal the ATM, but it is revealed that the ATM thief, JD, is Ricky's cousin and he was the one who committed the crime after borrowing Ricky's truck. That was Ricky's third strike, and he could be sentenced to life in prison. Calvin uses the $20,000 from Lester to bail Ricky out of jail. Once Calvin picks Ricky up from the jail, Ricky is angry at his cousin for betraying him and wants to kill him. Ricky had called JD from jail & when JD found out that this was Ricky's third strike, he was happy because Ricky would be jailed for life & could not harm JD anyways. Calvin tries to calm him down, but Ricky does not show any sign of calming down. Calvin gives Ricky a gun he found that fell out of Ricky's locker at the shop and is disappointed that Ricky is going to end up right back in jail. Ricky tells Calvin to pull the car over, and he does. Ricky gets out and decides to throw the gun off the bridge they are on and into the water before getting back into the car, proving that he does not want to get in any more trouble with the law. Then they both go to see Lester. Lester, as well as JD and Billy (who were still trying to pry it open, by using the blow torch in Lester's workshop, without Lester's knowledge) are confronted by Calvin and Ricky. Calvin and Ricky demands Lester to give Calvin his barbershop back. Rickey threatens to reveal the existence of the stolen ATM machine to the police along with the fact that Lester is dealing with stolen car parts in his workshop. Lester is angered and orders his bodyguard Monk (Kevyn Morrow) to pull out his gun. The police arrive just in time to save Calvin and Ricky. JD and Billy are arrested. Calvin and Ricky take the ATM and get a $50,000 reward for returning it to police. They get the money, and the barbershop reopens with even better business than before. In the meantime, Calvin's wife, Jennifer (Jazsmin Lewis), has given birth to a baby boy.
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