Movie Review: 'Coming 2 America'

Will we as a collective culture ever tire of having our nostalgia reheated like leftovers and served to us on a silver platter? Whether it is the return of Bill and Ted or another miserable Terminator rehash, Hollywood is continually rewarded for serving us warmed up nostalgia as if it were a gourmet meal with the media and the adoring public watching every reiteration, so I get why they do it. The question is for you, dear reader, why do you keep treating bowls of pre-packaged microwave goo like it is filet mignon from the finest restaurant?

A good example of this failing nostalgia is the new to Amazon Prime sequel to Coming to America, cleverly titled Coming 2 America, ho ho. Coming 2 America is little more than a dimwitted rehash of jokes that were barely amusing in the first movie. Here, the jokes are recycled, composted, and used to make the same joke all over again, at a slightly downgraded quality. Upcycling this is not.

Coming 2 America returns star Eddie Murphy and pal Arsenio Hall to the fictional African kingdom of Zamunda where Murphy’s King Akeem is as happy as ever. He has three beautiful daughters, he remains happily married to Queen Lisa (Shari Headley), and he’s just helped open the first McDowell’s Restaurant in Zamunda because that fictional McDonald’s rival is apparently still a very funny idea that Eddie Murphy hasn’t run into the ground.

At the very least, we still get the brilliant John Amos as Cleo McDowell so that minor plot point is kind of worth it. Unfortunately, we have to say goodbye very quickly to another capable veteran in James Earl Jones. Jones’ King Jaffe Joffer is dying and in order to give the movie an excuse to rehash the big dance sequence from the first movie, King Jaffe requests that his funeral be held while he’s still alive and able to attend.

Thus we get the lovely scene of famed elderly actor James Earl Jones upright in a coffin and serenaded by En Vogue and Salt and Pepa, two more acts busily assaulting our nostalgia. If that’s not enough of a hackneyed, idiot premise, the movie steals a joke from a dozen other bad comedies by having the funeral narrated in person by Morgan Freeman. The joke was not particularly funny when Mike Myers did it in The Love Guru in 2008 and it’s not great here.

At the very least, that’s a modern joke. Much of the rest of the jokes in Coming 2 America are rehashes of the original whether it is the reappearance of Coming to America characters like the barbershop guys, Arsenio Hall’s less than pious man of God or Mr Sexual Chocolate, Randy Watson. These characters were a wonder in 1988 when we were amazed at the makeup and effects used to put Eddie and Arsenio in the same room with themselves.

More than 30 years later we’ve seen good and bad CGI, this isn’t as impressive as it was 30 years ago. Thus, we could use some jokes here and we really don’t get them. One of the barbershop guys refers to Akeem 'Kunta Kinte' in a repeat of a joke from the first movie, word for word. Randy Watson at least sings a different song than he did in the first movie but the performance is baffling as Eddie seems to long for us to kind of take Randy Watson seriously, as if he were genuinely talented when the joke in the first movie was that he was cringe inducing.

I haven’t even got to what approximates a plot in Coming 2 America. So, here goes, apparently in the time that Akeem was in New York City, Semmi arranged for him to be sexually assaulted by Mary, played by Leslie Jones. The result of this unwanted sexual encounter was Lavelle (Jermaine Fowler). As luck would have it, Akeem is in need of a son as Zamunda’s neighbors, Nextdoria, ho ho, is going to attack Zamunda, perceiving a weakness in Akeem as king because he did not produce a male heir.

Thus, Akeem and Semmi return to Queens to retrieve his illegitimate son. This doesn’t take very long. The pair quickly locate him and inform him of his royal lineage. For a moment you think that the biological accuracy of this father son combination is going to be a plot point but no, it’s just sloppy storytelling. Lavelle, with Mary in tow, quickly uproots to Zamunda to become the future King, much to the dismay of Akeem’s oldest daughter, Princess Meeka (Kiki Layne) who is a stand in for fake woke girl power wrapped up in character with 10 minutes of screen time.

If you can’t figure out that there is a conflict between father and daughter over his inability to see how she deserves to be the future of Zamunda, you aren’t trying very hard. This paper thin plot is little more than a coat hanger for the many, many references to the first Coming to America movie with Lavelle reliving some of his dad’s exploits but in Zamunda instead of Queens and with a great deal less enthusiasm and talent.

To give you a better sense of the comedy you will experience if you choose to endure Coming 2 America, the movie thinks that learning to walk like a royal is hilarious. It gets even funnier when a royal learns how to walk like a 'pimp' and how to talk to 'Ho’s.' Are you laughing? I didn’t when I was suffering through this scene. It’s not merely unfunny, it’s also derivative of any fish out of water story ever about characters who move from lower class to high society.

If I laid out every bad premise for a scene in Coming 2 America we’d be here all day and I frankly can’t continue to relive this experience. So let’s cut to the end with a minor amount of praise, what little was enjoyable about Coming 2 America. Wesley Snipes plays the lead villain is Coming 2 America as the Warlord of Nextdoria. That Snipes is good enough to overcome the laziness of Nextdoria as a premise is a signal to how talented and likable Snipes is.

Instead of wasting your time on Coming 2 America, you should watch Snipes in New Jack City. That movie just celebrated the 30th Anniversary of its release and while it too is a relic of the past, it’s at least one that we won’t have to rehash in a sequel as Nino Brown had the good taste to be gunned down at the end. Coming 2 America is streaming now, free for Amazon Prime subscribers.