Coming 2 America (2021)

PG-13.  Considering that the first movie was a hard R, this movie really does a tap dance trying to manage a PG-13 for this film. It's got a lot more innuendo as opposed to straight up nudity.  The outfits are scanty, but they aren't as revealing as they could be.  Really, the bigger problem that this movie is that it plays up stereotypes, which may be dated humor for 2021.  PG-13.

DIRECTOR: Craig Brewer

Okay, I had to go through a lot to get this movie watched in time.  I had to do that tense negotiation thing, knowing that my wife hadn't watched Coming to America, let alone having to convince her to watch something for the Academy Awards that was exclusively for a makeup award. But do you know what helped?  Watching a bunch of really serious movies leading up to the Academy Awards and then changing it up with some really lighthearted goofy humor.  So if I go on a rant about how comedy sequels are largely unnecessary and that this movie stinks, realize that it is in the context of "I had a pretty good time watching this with my wife, who also mostly had a good time."  That's a pretty stellar review, if I have to say so myself.

There's something about the comedy sequel (see, I told you!) that is always a little clunky.  I don't think we've really learned our lesson about comedy sequels, especially those that are legacy style sequels.  You know, those movies that come out along time after the film and we're only make this movie for nostalgia's sake.  (I'm looking at you next, Top Gun: Maverick.) In my head, this all started with Blues Brothers 2000, coincidentally another John Landis film.  See, I'm a guy who really liked Blues Brothers 2000 when it first came out, despite the fact that everyone else hated it.  It was only when I slept on that movie did I discover that it is actually pretty darned bad.  I think the same can be said about Coming 2 America.  Now, Coming 2 America does some things really right.  I don't want to completely shoot down a movie that was mostly a good time.  I have to applaud the film for changing locations for the majority of the film.  With Blues Brothers 2000, it was a rehash of the first movie decades later.  But with Coming 2 America, the jokes were rehashed while the plot kind of changed.

The only thing about that whole new plot?  It really wasn't that new.  With the fish-out-of-water trope, we tend to have a variation of the fish-out-of-water trope for the second film.  Look at films like The Karate Kid Part II or Crocodile Dundee 2.  The first film places someone away from their home in America.  There are some mix-ups and cultural differences that we're supposed to look at with either awe or humor, but that is all resolved when both parties meet in the middle to discover the person behind the culture.  But in the second film, it is the American coming to another location.  Rather than really treating the American like he or she is at fault, odd behavior is recontextualized as normal.  What it does for the film is make everything bigger.  Rather than an outsider making a small faux-pas in a country, the American seems to upset a lot of people.  That doesn't usually happen with the OG fish-out-of-water tale.  American reactions in these stories is a side-glance implying, "Boy, ain't this guy a trip?"  But when the Americans go overseas and mess up, there are people fainting and cultures being disrespected.  I don't know if this shocks anyone, but that's exactly what happens in Coming 2 America.

Maybe it is because I have little obsessiveness over the original Coming to America, but I honestly don't care a lot about what is going on in this movie.  Part of what I loved about this movie is how good Akeem is throughout the film.  He's this really genuine character who is doing his best with an odd situation.  For some reason, the sequel needs to make him imperfect.  I don't deny that characters need to grow for a franchise to keep going.  But I also feel like 1) Akeem isn't that bad of a guy and he keeps getting yelled at and 2) he makes bad choices from time-to-time that seem really out of character so he can be criticized by other characters and so that there can be some conflict in the story.  It all just seems so bizarre.  But I can tell you that I'm already overthinking this story more than the people who actually wrote this story.  

Because for all of my critiques about sequelized storytelling, Coming 2 America is just an excuse to tell the exact same jokes that they did in the first movie. Sure, it's fun to poke fun at the 21st century after the first movie poked fun at the '80s.  But there are just so many callbacks to the first film.  Honestly, there didn't need to be all of these winks to the characters that came from the first film.  It's just really good to see Eddie Murphy and Arsenio Hall together.  And, yeah, I loved the characters that they created from the first film.  But I would really rather meet all new characters than rehash the same old people.  Because that's what made Coming to America special.  As goofy as some of those sequences were, it was all new.  It was insane to see how many different characters that these two guys would make.  But it was practically the same number for this one.  It's seeing the same magic trick twice.  It's not as exciting the second time.  Sure, the effects are slightly better, so you can actually have Eddie Murphy talking to Eddie Murphy, but that's pretty lame in the grand scheme of things.  

All said and done?  This movie probably shouldn't have been made.  It is as safe of a legacy sequel as can be.  Sure, I had a good time with it.  But there's nothing all that impressive happening with this movie.  It's just callback after callback and I want something to change the game again.