Coming 2 America is a movie that started strong but progressively just gets less and less interesting, less and less funny. It’s not a total disaster, but it needed more time in the oven. It also has a core script issue in that its confused about who the movie should be about, I think.

The flick is a sequel to Coming to America where, 30 years later, Eddie Murphy is now King of his African nation but he doesn’t have a male heir (“just” three daughter). Under pressure from a neighboring warlord (played by Wesley Snipes), he finds out he has a bastard son in America so he goes abroad to bring the boy (and his mother played by Leslie Jones) home. Can the new kid figure out this foreign nation, what it means to be prince, and fall in love in time? Will Eddie Murphy hold his family together under anger about the patriarchal rules of leadership? How many characters in old age makeup will Murphy and Arsenio Hall get to play this time?

So essentially this is a reverse Coming to America… maybe more properly titled Coming to Zamunda. It spends maybe twenty minutes in America but the core of the film is the bastard son trying to adjust to living in a royal palace and dealing with the politics and customs of his new home. Which is fine if a little hard to connect with… but it seems to me the movie’s structure is off. It should have started with the boy and showed his life more in NYC… and then have Murphy swoop in from out of the blue. But, I suppose, that would just be The Princess Diaries… and also we paid for Eddie Murphy, we should get Eddie Murphy.

All of that is well and good… but what really matters is whether or not I cared about the plot and whether or not I laughed. And I was more-or-less into the flick for about the first half and then started to lose interest. The movie just gets a little too shaggy, a little less focused as it goes along. And, more to the point since it’s a comedy, I started to laugh less… to be less amused by the shenanigans.

The movie doesn’t go off the rails in any major way… it just slowly peters out. It’s unfortunate since I love that they got the original cast back, including a ton of cameos and callbacks without being a complete imitation of the original (which a lot of people say it is). I like that we live in a world where both James Earl Jones and John Amos are still alive and kicking to return to this movie. I just wish the flick was stronger, funnier, and more focused.

Score: 72