MOVIE REVIEW: Coming 2 America (2021)

Now that’s how you do a 33-year old sequel. Seriously.

Coming to America is arguably my favorite Eddie Murphy movie of all time, for too many reasons. It was one of the first R-rated movies I was allowed to watch as a child, because the rest of the family wanted to watch it and I was there with them in the house.

It’s a classic through and through, and definitely one of those movies that fans of it start cringing when they hear about a sequel, especially three decades later. How old is the original cast? How many of them are coming back? How good could it possibly be given how comedy itself has changed since the late 80’s?

The answers are: The cast doesn’t look too old, nearly all of them came back and it’s very good for a nostalgic and modern comedic crowd.

You know good and damn well I couldn’t care less about Rotten Tomatoes or what any of the critics have to say about……well, anything. This will be the umpteenth time I disagree with many of them, and I’ll fight them on this one, seriously.

Coming 2 America could have been a lazy sequel, subjectively speaking. It could have been nothing but two hours of callbacks, easter eggs and guest cameos strung together by a razor thin storyline, and I’m sure that’s exactly how some of the negative critics have described it. Yes there are numerous callbacks to the first film, yes there are easter eggs and yes there are a slew of awesome guest cameos, but none of that is strung together by a razor thin plot.

No, in this case it all comes together by remembering what was important about the first movie: Heart, and an actual story that made sense.

The first Coming to America film is about Prince Akeem ditching Zamundan tradition in the form of an arranged marriage, to instead seek out his true bride, a woman that would love him for who he was and would be much more than just an obedient wife to him.

The sequel is about Akeem becoming king and struggling to retain the mindset that he had as a prince, as the weight of his kingdom descends upon him and the family he’s built for the past 30 years, a mindset that he comes face to face with when he discovers an illegitimate son still living in Queens that could be the heir to his throne.

If you’re familiar with Kenya Barris, most notably from Blackish, then how this movie is written should be no surprise to you. It’s today’s comedy through and through, complete with a message about tolerance, understanding and changing for the good of all, and for anyone that wants to argue it’s too progressive or “woke” for a movie like this, watch the first film again and see the same message there. Just as Akeem was looking to buck traditional patriarchy in 1988, he’s in the middle of a world pulling him to do the same in 2021, despite the pull of that established patriarchy standing tall in the process. Indeed, he’s fighting the same battle he did when he turned 21, but after seeing it from the progressive side in his youth, he’s wrestling with it from the patriarchal side as king.

When I said nearly all the cast from the original came back, I wasn’t kidding. When this movie was announced some years back, I had my own personal expectations on who needed to be back and who I could live with if they didn’t come back. Obviously Eddie Murphy, who looks fantastic for 59 years old, and Arsenio Hall were going to be back, and it only made sense that they’d bring their characters back with them. All of them. Mr. Clarence and the barbers at My-T-Sharp, the old Jewish customer playing chess, and of course Randy Watson and his band Sexual Chocolate, who play so fine don’t you agree?

No, I don’t care that the barbers or the Jewish man would be close to 100 years old if not older. The nostalgia flowed when they were on screen. Period.

I wanted James Earl Jones back as King Jaffe Joffer but understood if he wasn’t in it. He was. No worries.

Same went for Paul Bates as Oha and John Amos as Cleo McDowell. They were both back for this one.

My non-negotiable was Shari Headley as Lisa. You can’t do a sequel without her, especially if you’re actually building on the principles of what the first movie did with Akeem’s character. Clearly Paramount, who owned this film before selling to Amazon for a Prime Video release, agreed with me. Lisa is indeed back for this one, as she should have been.

I would have been happy with that honestly, but they went further. Garcelle Beauvais back as an elder rose bearer now. Vanessa Bell Calloway back as Imani. They even brought Louie Anderson back to work at McDowell’s. There’s more, along with some seriously great guest cameos and some tie-ins directly to the first film.

Then there’s the new blood, most notably Jermaine Fowler’s Lavelle Junson, the illegitimate son Akeem never knew he had, Leslie Jones as his mother Mary, Tracy Morgan as his Uncle Reem, Kiki Layne as Princess Meeka, Akeem’s eldest daughter that has been training to be queen, and Wesley Snipes as General Izzi, the antagonist of the film with a very clever connection to the first film that I should have picked up on sooner.

The movie isn’t long. In fact, at 110 minutes it’s actually seven minutes shorter than the first film, but it doesn’t cut corners and even though it has a faster pace at times, it never really feels rushed overall. There’s plenty of character moments here that really give this film the heart it should have and do well to flesh out the perspective of the important characters involved. Again, this isn’t a lazy sequel. Director Craig Brewer and company knew they had to tell a real story with this one, just as the original film did, and they seriously did a great job with it, while managing to balance nostalgia and old comedic turns with more modern humor. The new blood didn’t feel out of place with the original cast or vice versa. Everyone involved knew the story they were telling and fit really well into the narrative world of modern day Queens or modern day Zamunda.

Seriously, I’m impressed with how good this movie was. I wasn’t expecting it to be lesser at all, but I had my concerns over how much of a story and heart it would have and how much it would be a '“real movie” as opposed to just being a reunion tour from 1988. Gloriously, Coming 2 America really is a sequel worthy of the original film that spawned it.

Check it out on Amazon Prime Video and see for yourself.