It took 30 years for Eddie Murphy to come out with a sequel to his classic film Coming to America. The new film Coming 2 America was released last Friday on Amazon Prime. There was a lot of anticipation for this movie, since the first one was so beloved by so many people. Unfortunately, this movie fell short of the first one. In fact, this movie was nowhere remotely as good as the first one. To go a step further, this wasn’t a good movie at all.
The storyline sounded interesting, Eddie Murphy’s character, Akeem discovers he has a son in America. He travels with his trusty sidekick Semmi (Arsenio Hall) to retrieve him so he can become heir to the throne. I’m not spoiling anything by telling you that his son’s mother is played by comedienne Leslie Jones. I won’t go into details about how Eddie Murphy had a son with Leslie Jones. I will say though, based on Prince Akeem’s penchant to find the perfect woman in the first movie, him hooking up with her makes their connection unrealistic.
I guess the writers thought that the improbability of them being together would be funny in itself. Based on that, it seems they just threw a scenario behind it and figured it would work. And that’s where the problem lies at in this movie; it felt like they just threw some shit together and filmed it. They did show the courtesy of bringing all the old characters back. However, they didn’t breathe any new life into those characters. They are saying and doing the same thing they did 30 years ago. In fact, a lot of things from the old movie was recycled for this new movie. I just felt like that if I wanted to watch the old Jewish guy say “Is that velvet?” or the old guy from the barbershop say “that boy good!” … I could have watched the first one.
One of the writers on the movie was Kenya Barris, the creator of the show Black-Ish. You would think he could have helped them come up with better material for the movie. Along with old cast, there were features by Wesley Snipes, Michael Blackson, Tracey Morgan, Morgan Freeman, Teyana, Rotimi, Rick Ross and a few more surprises. Despite the A-List cast, it was a C-List movie. Dare I say, it was kind of corny to me. I didn’t think Eddie Murphy had to make a classic movie, just a good one. He did neither.