Coming To America (1988)

There’s a weird dichotomy with comedies as they age: either they keep their laugh-worthy nature – Spy Hard (1996), Top Secret (1984), Airplane (1980) – or they go through some kind of bizarre aging ritual where they don’t just lose their funniness, they become aggressively unfunny, on par with watching a bad improv group that actively insults the audience.
“Animal House” (1978) was probably absolutely hilarious when it came out, when there were vastly different social norms. To a modern viewer, it’s just callous rape jokes.
“Ghost Busters” (1984) was entertaining enough, but the jokes all landed flat for me; maybe that’s because I’d heard them ad nauseum before actually seeing the movie, so those lines simply didn’t hit, but the lines were funnier when my dad said them at home than when the actors said them on screen.
And then there’s “Coming To America” (1988) which was boring and frustrating to watch. There were jokes in there, and I chuckled a few times, but whatever cultural magic and pop-culture love this movie had for audiences in ’88, it’s missing in the ‘20s.
This struck me as an SNL skit that someone thought would make a good movie, and then they did, without realizing that seven minutes of goofiness once a week does not a feature-film make.

On the off chance you haven’t seen this movie yet – or want a refresher – here’s a quick synopsis:
Prince Akeem (Eddie Murphy) of the Kingdom of Zamunda turned 21 and was directed by his father, King Joffer (James Earl Jones), to get married via arranged marriage. Akeem wasn’t keen on that, and instead asked to travel to America to find someone who he could connect with mentally, instead of just on a carnal level for nation-state ties, and thus he took his faithful servant Semmi (Arsenio Hall) with him to Queens, New York, to find his future bride.
It was a standard fish-out-of-water story, as Akeem learned how to fit in with ‘regular’ people in his slum apartment, working at the bottom of the totem-pole at McDowell’s.
While working there, he was instantly love-struck by Lisa (Shari Headley), the owner’s daughter and corporate bookkeeper who was dating Darryl (Eriq La Salle), the man-child heir to the “Soul Glo” hair product empire.
Akeem won Lisa’s heart be simply being himself, never using his royalty and riches to try to buy her love. Even once Lisa learned the truth about his background, Akeem was willing to abdicate the throne so he could live with her in Queens. As this was approximately a rom-com, Lisa was mad that Akeem had been hiding his “true” self from her, but as Akeem pointed out, she had loved him when he’d told her he was a goat herder, and now he was just the same guy but with magnitudes more money.
It was actually a pretty good message, since it was all about finding love for the sake of love, not buying it or having it handed to you.
Collectively, Akeem had about 40 days to fall in love with Lisa, which isn’t exactly a normal timeline for starting a healthy, long-term relationship, but it’s far more realistic than anything Disney bothers with.

Semmi was the straightman in this, constantly annoyed at Akeem’s bizarre, wide-eyed infatuation with living amongst the commoners, and the temporary life in the lowest-end apartment in the city. I 100% understood where Semmi was coming from at any given time, especially when Akeem mentioned the possibility of staying in Queens instead of returning to the luxuries of the kingdom.

Lisa’s father, Cleo McDowell (John Amos), was a pretty sleazy character. He ripped of McDonald’s in its entirety, swapping minor name differences for legal purposes, and constantly acknowledging that his restaurant was barely more than copyright infringement. It’s unclear why McDowell’s needed to exist in this movie as a Mickey-D’s competitor, and why that couldn’t have just been the stand-in instead, as it was a weird bit that kept getting brought up but absolutely never paid off in any way, and no one had the good sense to ask “Why did you rip off the biggest fast-food chain in the world?”
Cleo also kept pushing Lisa to marry Darryl, the man-child, simply because his family had money, which is not a great look for any movie, as all it did was paint Cleo as a money-grubbing asshole.

There was also a bizarre sidecast of three barbers, an old jewish man, and a very creepy pastor who all just existed. They had multiple speaking lines, but none of what they said at any time was make any sense. Yes, I understood what they were saying, and I could understand any individual sentence, but their entire reason to exist in the movie seemed to just be to fill time between plot points – you could have completely removed them and the movie wouldn’t have changed at all.
I’m sure they were supposed to be situational humor based in stereotypes, but those stereotypes have gone the way of the dodo and don’t make any sense anymore.

One of my biggest frustrations in this was how much the jokes just fell flat. Eddie Murphy is a comedian! I understand that his character was royalty now living amongst the peasants, but he clearly spoke English and Zamunda used accented English as the primary language, so it’s not like there was a barrier for him once in NYC, especially taking to Lisa with her Midwestern Standard accent. 
And yet, somehow, there were constantly ‘jokes’ based around Akeem not understanding something due to a translation error, or visibly having to think about his response to a question. Many of those thinking moments were the results of joke setups, where his pause was supposed to be comedic timing for the punchline. It never worked. Ever. Not a single time.
Instead, we were left with a series of bad editing jobs where the pause was too long between setup and payoff, which killed the momentum of the scene.

I will give this movie some credit in a few places:
First and most importantly: Lisa was not an object. She was very clearly her own woman, and whenever anyone tried to treat her like a prize to be won, she immediately pushed back, and ultimately her marriage to Akeem was willing and consensual.
There was also a really impressive dance sequence in the beginning. Not that it really added anything of value to the movie, just that it was really cool to see.
And finally: Queen Aoleon (Madge Sinclair) wasn’t just a pretty wife for King Joffer. She had a mind of her own, like Lisa, and repeatedly pushed back against the King’s foolish wishes to keep things ‘traditional.’

And… that’s it. It wasn’t a particularly deep movie, nor was it anything ground-breaking.
If you’re reading this and you haven’t already seen it, I do not recommend it.
This movie barely earned itself a Two-Claw rating. If I were allowed to fly anywhere, and I saw this was available for in-flight entertainment, I would probably watch it out of sheer curiosity knowing that “Coming 2 America” (2021) was out, but it was not worth streaming from the comfort of my own couch – there are so many other things I would have rather watched.