Coming 2 America (2021)

You know what’s hilarious? Rape.
No… wait… that can’t be right.
Maybe it’s when women rape men? 
Hold on…
Maybe it’s when drugs and alcohol are involved, and it’s clear the woman wants a child for various reasons, and it seems like the man is consenting because he’s conscious, but it’s still rape because the man isn’t sober.
Still no?
Well then:  why on earth was that the major plot point for “Coming 2 America” (2021)?!

Eddie Murphy is a comedian. He lived through the last decade and he saw what happened in the #MeToo movement just like the rest of us.
So why on earth would the unnecessary sequel to his ’88 flick need to be entirely hinged on a rape?

Am I saying ‘rape’ too many times? Is it making you feel uncomfortable?
Good, because I am too, and this movie was incredibly uncomfortable to watch, from beginning to end.

The sequels that get made decades after the original simply don’t need to be made. “Independence Day 2: Resurgence” (2019) comes to mind first and foremost, and the upcoming “Space Jam: A New Legacy” (2021) has me concerned. “Coming 2 America” should have been shut down during production. When Eddie Murphy went to the Paramount headquarters and said ‘hey, we should make this,’ the studio exec should have simply said ‘no.’
Presumably this got green-lit because Paramount wanted to cash in on nostalgia-dollars from folks who saw the first movie 33 years ago, but there’s no way that they made any money on this sequel as it was released straight to Amazon Prime with no hope for a theatrical release, though I cannot fathom a large enough crowd paying to see it even if it had.
That said: I don’t know how this got made. The part of the first movie that made it tolerable were absent from here, as this was filled with man-child behaviors, bizarre stereotypes, and stuff that absolutely made me question “Is this racist? If a white person directed this movie, would they get blackballed from Hollywood?”

So let’s back up; I’m going to narrate the storyline to you, because you should not watch this movie, and I’m hoping I turn you off from any inkling of interest in seeing it.

Set 33 years after the first movie, King Joffer (James Earl Jones) was on his deathbed. He proclaimed to his son, Prince Akeem (Eddie Murphy) that throne could only pass to a male heir.
It’s entirely unexplainable why this seemed to be the first time that Joffer was telling Akeem about this crucial hereditary detail, as Akeem had been waiting for the throne for the last three decades and had three daughters, the oldest of whom, Meeka (Kiki Layne), had spent her life preparing to take the crown one day too. Obviously, the answer is “they needed a plot device to build the movie around,” but what a stupid option to go with.

Seriously though: the entire death-bed sequence bore an uncanny similarity in both dialog and gravitas to the death-bed sequence of the King from “StarDust” (2007). I was half-ready for the king to take off his royal ruby necklace and launch it into space to be found by the true heir to the throne of Stormhold.

Just by Akeem’s luck, it turned out he did have a son – a bastard child born of rape while at a nightclub in Queens – as revealed by a weird old witch doctor who was suddenly critical running the kingdom in the 2020s and was never referenced in the first movie.
Then there was a flashback that showed how Mary (Leslie Jones) drugged Akeem while her friend was hooking up with Semmi (Arsenio Hall) in another room.
Akeem was completely fine with suddenly remembering that someone had abused him, and that he had a son in another country who was three decades old, which conveniently lined up with the threat of war from neighboring Next Dooria, as lead by the warlord General Izzi (Wesley Snipes), who threatened to take over Zamunda unless Akeem married one of his children to one of Izzi’s children in one week.
So, without concern, question, or even telling his wife Lisa (Shari Headley), he bolted back to New York City to comment on gentrification and find his son.
And he ran into those same three weird barbers and the Jewish guy again, who, like in the first movie, did absolutely nothing to further progress anything here.
Also King Joffer died, so now Prince Akeem was King Akeem, but that had barely any weight on the story by itself.

Thanks to plot conveniences, Akeem found his son LaVelle (Jermaine Fowler) hustling tickets in Times Square; he then followed LaVelle back home to the apartment he shared with his mother Mary, Uncle Reem (Tracy Morgan), and a few random folks who didn’t get names or speaking lines.
Mary was pleasantly surprised to see her “African Prince” again, though neither she nor LaVelle were sold on the idea of LaVelle taking the throne and crown of Zamunda… at least not until Semmi’s brief case conveniently opened and spilled out bricks of cash and gold, at which point LaVelle and Mary were immediately on board.

Remember, just yesterday, how I pointed out that the thing that made “Coming to America” (1988) tolerable was that Akeem wanted to find love when money wasn’t part of the equation, and he was 110% willing to work his way from the bottom to earn Lisa’s affections, even if it meant abdicating the throne and the riches that came with?
Well, here they just wanted to throw money LaVelle and hand him everything. He didn’t have to earn his place as the prince; it was literally handed to him. The saving grace of the original was a willingness to work hard and actually earn a place in the world, whereas here it was simply “wouldn’t it be cool if some long-lost relative died and left you all their money in their will?”

Anyway.
Akeem took LaVelle back to Zamunda, only to have to then explain to Lisa why he’d gone on such a trip, that he had a mystery son, and that – oh yeah – he was going to actively crush his eldest daughter’s dreams of taking the throne, because the ‘tradition’ was that only a man could be the ruler.
Tradition, mind you, that was only codified by word of mouth and could be as easily revoked as the ‘only marry other royalty’ rule from the first movie that King Joffer overruled.

Now in Zamunda, LaVelle had one week to “learn” how to be a prince: part ‘learning the role’ and part ‘completing the three ‘princely’ tests.’
When he wasn’t actively flailing and barely succeeding at the learning and testing portions, LaVelle met the royal barber Mirembe (Nomzamo Mbatha), with whom he struck up an immediate friendship. Mirembe talked to LaVelle with a candor that no staffer would ever talk to royalty (or enlisted to general officer, or McD’s cashier to their CEO, etc). That friendship quickly turned into romance and LaVelle stole the royal jet to fly back to Queens to marry Mirembe in a very questionable church, as wedded by the creepy pastor from the first movie.
Mary, who was all about the idea of being the queen regent(?) and aggressively pushing her son to complete the work to take the throne so she could live the rest of her days in the lap of luxury, was somehow equally okay with the idea of him dumping all of the riches and getting married and going back to his life of being barely employed.

General Izzi showed up a few more times, mostly to enter the Zamundan castle unannounced and do strange dance moves. One time they showed him surrounded by child soldiers in what was presumably a “dark comedy” bit.
But by and large, Izzi was just a weirdo. Someone gave Wesley Snipes carte blanche to just be a goober and wriggle around whatever scene he was in. He never felt event slightly realistic as a character, and his constant writhing just added to his cartoonishness.
Despite being a warlord and not getting peace-by-marriage with Zamunda, Izzi was quite happy to simply open up a trade network into his completely war-destroyed country. Sure, economic prosperity can bring peace, but that’s a big stretch from the combat and conquest and immediate riches that Izzi was gunning for literally seven days prior.
We were also unlucky enough to have to watch one of those “a handful of children use hand-to-hand combat to defeat a much larger crowd of adults with guns” scenes. I don’t know why that was included here, because this clearly wasn’t a kids’ movie, which is the only time when it’s acceptable.

Ultimately, Akeem blessed LaVelle’s marriage to Mirembe and discarded the ‘kings-only’ tradition so that Meeka could take the throne. He also declared that LaVelle would become the new Zamundan ambassador to America and would move the entire embassy from Washington D.C. to Queens, since that’s where LaVelle wanted to be.

So… uh… ta da! Everyone was happy and everything worked out perfectly and no one deserved the positive ending that they got.

To introduce him in the beginning, there was a scene wherein LaVelle interviewed for a job at a “white” workplace, where Uncle Reem told him “don’t use your white voice.” The interviewer was apparently the CEO’s son, who appeared to be two seconds and three braincells short of blurting a string of racial slurs and simply admitting that he got his job due to nepotism.
I’m sure that when the scene was pitched, it was probably labeled something like “subtle satire,” but it really came across as “punch you in the face with a poorly directed comment on current events.”

There was a very minor parallel in this to the arrival of Erik Killmonger (Michael B. Jordan) in “Black Panther” (2018), regarding a long-lost member of a royal family returning to a kingdom to take the throne, but at least Killmonger was understandably angry that Wakanda had let things like the slave trade happen, and that the royal family of Wakanda was actively not participating in the world goal of solving problems.

Here, LaVelle was just a loser. He had the chance to become kind of a country and have everything he ever wanted and all it would take was for him to behave a certain way for seven days.
That’s it.
Seven days.
One week, and he’d have riches beyond his wildest dreams, but he couldn’t even pull that off, because he suddenly flip-flopped from “struggling, hard-working boot-strapper” to “this isn’t exactly what I want, so I don’t want any of it at all” somewhere around day three.

The story relied heavily on flashbacks and callbacks. There were probably a solid 10 minutes of this movie that was just footage from the first movie played for context, while countless other scenes followed the same framework – and sometimes identical dialog – to stuff that happened in ’88.
It didn’t feel quite as creatively bankrupt as “Independence Day: Resurgence,” but it certainly wasn’t a good look.

Cleo McDowell (John Amos) and his bizarre McDonald’s knockoff were still around, this time with a branch in Zamunda, which continued to be a setup with no punchline.

As I’ve commented many times, making specific refences to brands or brand names in a movie clearly identifies the movie as happening in ‘our world,’ which is generally done for helpful world-building purposes.
However, when the main character is Eddie Murphy in a world where Pepsi, McDonald’s, Bvlgari, and Puma all exist too, it means that that somehow those globally-known brands exist yet no one ever looked at Akeem or Joffer or Mary and said “hey, you know, you look an awful lot like Murphy, Jones, or Jones…”
I get it, product placement is a thing to get a movie funded, but when overdone it completely takes you out of whatever you’re watching, especially if the movie is trying to pretend to be even slightly realistic.

The only good thing in this movie were the outfits. Whoever the costume designers were clearly had a blast playing with whatever fabrics and colors and patterns they were allowed to mess with.
Beyond that… nothing. There were no highlights to this movie. No good special effects, no great music, only 10 minutes of James Earl Jones.

I absolutely cannot recommend this movie to you.
Megan and I actually turned it off about halfway through, though we started it up again out of morbid curiosity and so I could write this.
Do not watch this. Chew a block of soap for a more useful way to spend your time.