What puts comedy to sleep isn’t the respectfulness that wrongly gets derided as political correctness; it’s nostalgia, which provides the false good feelings that turn comedy into self-satisfaction. A case in point is “Coming 2 America,” an update of the comedy, from 1988, that gave Eddie Murphy a showcase for his wide-ranging comedic artistry. The new film (available on Amazon, starting Friday) finds a few of its most inspired moments where it revises the plot to reflect current sensibilities, but its strained efforts at reviving the characters and situations of the original make it feel both hollow and leaden.
The story, of a pampered royal attempting to live like a commoner, is a venerable theme, rung most familiarly in “The Student Prince.” The premise is democratic by nature—it assumes that isolation and ignorance beset those in power, and suggests that a dose of life among the people (and a romantic attachment to one of them) will not just make the royal heir happier but, more important, make the ruler empathize with the subjects’ needs. In the 1988 version, the political stakes are low; the fictional country of Zamunda has no apparent problem with its monarchy (the king, Jaffe Joffer, is played by James Earl Jones; his wife, Queen Aoleon, by the late Madge Sinclair). Rather, its subject is generational—the liberation of a son from the stifling tradition that his parents maintain. The bulk of the comedy is situational, emerging from Prince Akeem’s comedic ignorance of both American life and the ordinary working world—yet his lofty perspective gives rise to a second layer of comedy that is an even greater showcase for Murphy, who also wrote the story.
The joy of the original is that its fish-out-of-water story puts the emphasis less on the fish than on the new atmosphere that he has to cope with. Prince Akeem makes his way through Queens, in the company of his wingman-valet Semmi (Arsenio Hall), to put Black life in a loving, satirical light. The barbershop that’s the social center of the poor neighborhood where Akeem chooses to live is where the pair hold court—Murphy as the barber Clarence and also as the kvetchy old Jewish man Saul, and Hall as the barber Morris. The movie sends up, with an admiring wink, the Black businessman Cleo McDowell (John Amos), with his proudly shameless fast-food knockoff McDowell’s, and it mocks the Black inheritor-bourgeois in the person of Darryl Jenks (Eriq La Salle), whom Cleo is setting up with his daughter Lisa (Shari Headley), who, however, falls in love with Akeem. It both lampoons and embraces a slick preacher with a hustle (played by Hall) and a cheesy R. & B. crooner (played by Murphy). Murphy’s story plays like a comedic collection of observational folklore, albeit one that’s rammed and trimmed and truncated in the tight package of eighties comedic conventions. (What Murphy can do when he shapes his own subject has been shown in “Harlem Nights,” his follow-up to “Coming to America,” which comes off as a much more sophisticated blend of drama and legend.)
The new plot closely follows the blueprint of the original. Akeem and Lisa are now married—they’re celebrating their thirtieth anniversary, in the company of their three daughters, Tinashe (Akiley Love), Omma (Bella Murphy, the star’s real-life daughter), and Meeka (KiKi Layne). But Akeem is still Zamunda’s crown prince—his father, Jaffe (played, again, by James Earl Jones), still reigns, but not for long. Foreseeing his own death, the king asks that a grand funeral bash (featuring Salt-N-Pepa, En Vogue, and Gladys Knight) be thrown for him while he’s alive, then promptly expires. As the new king, Akeem faces the crisis of how to find a new crown prince, because, though his daughters are the equals of any man in the kingdom, by Zamundan law only males can rule. Then a deus ex machina, in the person of Baba (Hall), the high priest of Akeem’s court, informs him that he has a son in Queens, Lavelle Junson (Jermaine Fowler), who’s thirty and unmoored, and living with his mother, Mary (Leslie Jones), and his uncle, Reem (Tracy Morgan). Akeem and Semmi travel to meet Lavelle (called, throughout, Akeem’s “bastard son”), then bring him back to Zamunda and put him through a course of princely training. Akeem’s eldest daughter, Meeka, despite her bitter disappointment in her country’s sexist law—and her father’s unwillingness to change it—accepts Lavelle as her brother and helps him to succeed on the most difficult part of a test (to clip the whiskers off a lion) in a brief scene of snappy wit. Meanwhile, Lavelle, in the face of his rigorous training, is also being prepared for an arranged marriage to Bopoto (Teyana Taylor), the daughter of General Izzi (Wesley Snipes). But, in a reprise of the original’s plot, Lavelle plans to defy tradition when he falls in love with his Zamundan hairdresser, Mirembe (Nomzamo Mbatha). Akeem, with the indispensable help of his daughters, wards off threats to Zamunda while recognizing the limits of ancient custom.
One problem with this hectic story line is that Murphy’s presence in it is dismayingly diminished. The movie is buoyant with forced good cheer, but it is, for the most part, both comedically and dramatically inert. In the original movie, Zamunda was a springboard; now it’s a landing place, but it’s not a thickly imagined place. The strongest and freest comedy is provided by Leslie Jones and Tracy Morgan as Lavelle’s mother and uncle; they accompany him to Zamunda, and their portrayals of everyday people thrust into exceptional circumstances are as exuberant and inventive as they are brief and incidental. Fowler, as Lavelle, is an amiable and lively presence, but his role offers him little chance for either comedy or drama. Layne is a powerfully expressive actor, but the character of Meeka, as scripted, is only a symbol of substance. The director, Craig Brewer, also made Murphy’s previous film, “Dolemite Is My Name”; there, Murphy’s virtuosic and energetic performance is compressed by the slick and glossy filmmaking. Here, in “Coming 2 America,” the direction keeps Murphy’s comedic might at arm’s length, never letting his explosive energy reach the surface of the screen.
The principal virtue of the movie is its endearing air of a family reunion, with many cast members returning, albeit for brief appearances—along with Murphy, Hall, and Headley are James Earl Jones, John Amos, Paul Bates, Louie Anderson, and Vanessa Bell Calloway, in the role of Imani Izzi, whom Akeem jilts in the earlier film. (Even the gag of Imani hopping and yipping out of the room—which the director of the first film, John Landis, cribbed from Howard Hawks’s 1948 comedy “A Song Is Born”—is reprised in the sequel.) There’s even a snippet of dialogue about the feebleness of Hollywood’s pointless sequels that is as much of a wink as it is an excuse. Like many reunions, the movie offers not an extended catch-up or an acknowledgment of great changes through time but, rather, a greeting, a warm and hearty word, a knowing nod to the past, and a feeling of disheartenment at the sentimental but hollow occasion. It’s burdened with its sense of dutiful effort.
