Movie Breakdown: Coming 2 America
Pre-Screening Stance:
Back when I had cable, I could always count on Coming To America being on somewhere, so I’ve seen it a million times and still to this day love it very much. Should there be a sequel? Probably not. But director Craig Brewer did a nice job putting Eddie Murphy back on the map via Dolemite Is My Name, so maybe he can recreate that magic here.
Post-Screening Ramble:
I wasn’t expecting a whole lot from Coming 2 America, and yet that was still too much. This is a bad movie. It’s not particularly funny, it has no heart, and it’s boring. The original is a pretty straight forward, fish out of water comedy with a novel hook – an African prince looking for his queen in actual Queens. Part 2 tries to reverse this by suddenly thrusting Lavelle (Jermaine Fowler), the NYC-based bastard son of Akeem (Eddie Murphy), into Zamunda, where he must quickly learn how to be a prince so that he can marry the daughter of General Izzi (Wesley Snipes) from the neighboring country of Nextdoria (seriously, that’s what it’s called), which will stave off war.
This setup, if you ask me, actually could have worked, as it lends itself right back to the fish out of water structure that worked so well in the first movie. However, this film does not bother trying to do anything new and is instead littered with lazy call backs to all of the characters, jokes, etc. that shined back in the 1988 flick. And what new stuff there is, it’s largely woeful (see again: Nextdoria). If I could, I’d tell you that Coming 2 America at least features some spirited work from Murphy and Arsenio Hall, but they both look disinterested and don’t even bother to hold their accents most of the time.
Coming 2 America is about as low effort as it gets, and I don’t think it’s worth two hours of your time. Pass!
The film will hit Prime Video tomorrow, March 5.
One Last Thought:
There’s a scene in this movie that’s hinged on a lion farting, in case you were wondering just how lazily written the whole damn thing is.
