Making a comedy is an inherently hard thing to do. To make someone laugh at carefully choreographed moments is an arguablely harder form of emotional manipulation than say, making the audience cry in a drama, due to the subjectivity of comedy. When a good comedy comes along that appeals to a large audience and stands the test of time it is something of a minor miracle. Enter Eddie Murphy’s 1988 hit Coming to America, one of the comedian’s biggest films with a legacy lasting decades. Continuing that Hollywood trend of never letting a good thing exist on its own, now we have Coming 2 America, a film that nobody asked for and that Amazon paid a pretty penny to add to their streaming offerings. Does it live up to the promise of the original? Not even close, but it isn’t the complete failure that many were anticipating (Zoolander 2 this is not) with a few genuine chuckles and strong supporting characters amidst a muddy story that gets just about everything else wrong.
Following his trip to New York in the eighties, Prince Akeem Joffer (Murphy) is now living a prosperous life in his home nation of Zamunda, married to Lisa (a returning Shari Headley) and father to three daughters. With the passing of his father King Jaffe (James Earl Jones) imminent and under threat of war with neighbouring Nexdoria, Akeem is forced to return to America with loyal aide Semmi (Arsenio Hall) in search for his bastard son Lavelle (Jermaine Fowler), who he plans to marry off to broker a peace deal with the Nexdorians. As the training of the new prince commences back in Zamunda, Lavelle begins to question whether he truly fits in with his new surroundings, and Akeem is forced to consider what kind of a king he plans to be for Zamunda and his family.
The opening scene of the sequel quickly introduces us to Akeem’s new brood before swiftly whisking us to the opening of a McDowell’s burger store in Zamunda, the first of many references to the original film. The scene is charming enough, with a returning John Amos and Louie Anderson supplying the laughs with a spoof of the current fad of Beyond burgers. Before long, however, you start to realise just how much the second entry in Akeem’s chapter is dependent on the first, constantly namedropping and calling back to the first film, even to the point of replaying entire scenes. Not a quick flashback to relay how that past event has influenced the current predicament, but the complete sequence presented again. It feels lazy and doesn’t seem to place any trust in the viewer. This isn’t a Christopher Nolan movie, the audience isn’t missing much if they don’t know who the rapping twins from the first film’s nightclub are. Rehashing characters also doesn’t do the film any credit, with the uproarious barbers played by Murphy and Hall returning to painfully unfunny effect. Where once there was over-the-top, completely silly banter, has now been replaced by stilted jokes that feel rehearsed rather than off-the-cuff, seemingly hamstrung by the film’s unwillingness to lean into the raunchy side of its predecessor.
That isn’t to say there aren’t some funny moments here and there, mostly delivered by the delightful supporting cast that play on the periphery of the action, jumping in with an absolute zinger when you least expect it. Leslie Jones and Tracy Morgan do the most of this as Lavelle’s mother and uncle, bringing street knowledge and a lack of decorum to the prim and proper palace life of Zamunda to hilarious effect. Eddie Murphy, the man who should be cracking most of the jokes, is strangely subdued this time around, tasked with delivering almost all of the big emotional moments instead of tapping into his tremendous comedic sensibilities. It’s almost seems as if director Craig Brewer doesn’t trust anyone else to deliver these emotional beats, instead leaving them to deliver the comedy. Jermaine Fowler – not to be unkind – is no Eddie Murphy and his character is painfully underwritten, flipping on a dime to upheave his life for Zamunda before inexplicably changing his tune after one conversation with the first girl he sees. This jarring, nonsensical development does nothing to get the audience on-board and from then on you’re just sitting through the predictable mess hoping for a chuckle or two. A vague attempt to challenge gender stereotypes with Akeem’s eldest daughter Meeka feels half-baked and is forgotten for most of the film until an incredibly obvious resolution, leaving nothing else to be desired other than that elusive joke that works.
After more than a 30 year wait, Coming 2 America arrives lacking the two most important aspects of the first: the emotional earnestness in Akeem’s simple, pure desire to find a wife and the counterpoint of the raunchy, hilarious shenanigans he constantly found himself in. Instead what we’re left with is a string of disjointed, lacklustre SNL-style skits which fail to make good use of one of the most extraordinary comedic talents of all-time, tied together by a generic, paper thin plot that never strikes any kind of emotional chord with its audience. If you don’t want the memory of your first trip to America with Akeem tarnished then choose to revisit that instead of this tired rehash.
Coming 2 America stars Eddie Murphy, Arsenio Hall, Shari Headley, Jermaine Fowler, John Amos, Wesley Snipes, Leslie Jones, Tracy Morgan, KiKi Layne & James Earl Jones – Streaming on Amazon Prime now.