There was nothing in the original 1988 Coming to America to suggest that it would warrant a sequel, other than its box-office success and enduring pop-culture presence. And more than 30 years later, no one involved in Coming 2 America has found a good reason for the sequel to exist, despite a handful of funny moments and a cast clearly having a good time returning to the fictional African land of Zamunda. And while star Eddie Murphy experienced a late-career resurgence by teaming up with director Craig Brewer for the 2019 biopic Dolemite Is My Name, but this new collaboration isn’t nearly as successful.
Murphy returns as Akeem, the prince of Zamunda who in the first movie traveled to New York City (specifically to Queens) to find his true love, in defiance of the traditional royal arranged marriage. There, he met Lisa McDowell (Shari Headley), the intelligent, hard-working daughter of restaurant owner Cleo McDowell (John Amos). While Akeem was disguised as an exchange student, he and Lisa fell in love, and she eventually returned with him to Zamunda to become his bride. It was a simple romantic comedy with plenty of fish-out-of-water humor as Akeem and his aide Semmi (Arsenio Hall) adjusted to their new surroundings in Queens.
Coming 2 America sort of reverses the formula, and the movie actually spends very little time in America (a better title might have been Coming to Zamunda). Now a father of three daughters, Akeem is set to become king of Zamunda following the death of his father Jaffe (James Earl Jones). But having no son and legitimate heir leaves King Akeem vulnerable to attack from General Izzi (Wesley Snipes), the warlord who rules the neighboring country of Nexdoria. In the first of several retcons that Coming 2 America applies to the previous movie, the intended bride that Akeem spurned decades ago is revealed to be a Nexdorian and Izzi’s sister. Izzi now wants his son to marry Princess Meeka (The Old Guard’s KiKi Layne), who is angry that her father won’t allow her to be Zamunda’s rightful heir.
More damaging to the wholesome tone of the original movie, Coming 2 America adds in a flashback revealing that before Akeem met Lisa, he had a one-night stand with Queens loudmouth Mary (Leslie Jones), who plied him with marijuana and took advantage of him. It’s played for laughs, but the impression is that Akeem was essentially raped and that both Joffe and Semmi knew about this for years and never told him. The whole incident is laughed off, and it’s merely a plot device to introduce Akeem’s long-lost son Lavelle (Jermaine Fowler), who’s grown up in Queens never knowing that he comes from a royal bloodline.
Akeem and Semmi travel to Queens to retrieve Lavelle, who’s happy to learn that he’s actually a prince and eager to journey to Zamunda, with his mother and his Uncle Reem (Tracy Morgan) in tow. These vulgar Queens residents are now the fish out of water in regal Zamunda, where Lavelle is trained in the ways of royalty and prepared for the “princely tests” that will qualify him to ascend to the Zamundan throne. Lavelle faces resentment from Meeka, and like young Akeem, he’s presented with a relative of General Izzi as his arranged bride, in order to secure peace between Zamunda and Nexdoria.
That’s a lot of plot for the sequel to a goofy romantic comedy, and while Coming 2 America’s multiple screenwriters attempt to tackle some more complex issues than the first movie did, they mostly fail to pull that off. Akeem, who was serene and kind-hearted in Coming to America, is now a bit closed-minded and controlling, like his father, and he has to learn to embrace the optimistic, progressive viewpoint of his youth. That applies both to Zamunda’s outdated sexist culture and to Lavelle’s arranged marriage, especially once Lavelle starts to fall for his Zamundan hairdresser Mirembe (Nomzamo Mbatha), much as Akeem once fell for Lisa.
The character journeys are pretty meager, though, and the abundance of subplots and supporting players too often crowds out the humor and relegates some of the original characters to bit parts. Amos shows up a couple of times (at a new Zamundan franchise of his McDonald’s-copying McDowell’s), and Jones is awkwardly inserted into scenes he wasn’t actually present to shoot. There are lots of celebrity cameos, and Murphy and Hall once again don prosthetics as a variety of ridiculous background characters.
Among the new faces, Fowler gets the biggest spotlight, and he’s appealing as the earnest Lavelle, who could have been a stereotypical screw-up but is instead a nice, well-meaning guy who’s in over his head. But just as he did in previous Murphy/Brewer collaboration Dolemite Is My Name, Snipes steals the show here as the flamboyant, devious General Izzi, who trains his soldiers with shake weights and dance video games.
It’s clearly important for Coming 2 America to have its own grounded romantic storyline, but Snipes’ performance shows how the movie could have committed to being a silly comedy about the absurdity of Zamundan life, without the need for tiresome world-building. For some reason, an hour into the movie, Mirembe essentially recaps the plot of Coming to America, complete with clips, turning it into “the legend of Akeem.”
Coming to America certainly doesn’t warrant that grandiose designation, and Coming 2 America doesn’t, either, no matter how hard it tries. Murphy and Hall retain their lifelong comic chemistry, Saturday Night Live veterans Jones and Morgan get in a few funny lines each, and Fowler proves that he could carry a feature film on his own. But their collective enthusiasm isn’t enough to carry this disjointed, unwieldy movie, which turns a simple comedy into a mythology-filled clunker.
Starring Eddie Murphy, Arsenio Hall, Jermaine Fowler, Leslie Jones, Tracy Morgan, KiKi Layne, Wesley Snipes, Shari Headley and Nomzamo Mbatha, Coming 2 America premieres Friday, March 5 on Amazon Prime.