Coming 2 America
Solid Gold!
Big shoes to fill and they filled them nicely. A lot could have gone wrong waiting 33 years to do a sequel to one of the most iconic movies of all time. It would have been better to do a sequel two or three years after and have that fail, but 33 years, now that Coming to America is officially a classic!? People would never let that go.
So let’s get this out of the way, Coming to America is a classic. You can’t touch Coming to America. What you can do is make a really funny movie. I would expect this is what it would be like if Eddie Murphy actually started doing stand up again. We all worry if he could possibly top what he did 30 years ago and forget what we were talking about cause we are laughing too hard.
For someone like Eddie who was joined with a big ensemble cast of who’s funny, I knew making us laugh could not be a problem. What did take me off-guard was how heart warming the film was. It’s just like the first cause while the main story, or the one they advertised, was about Prince Akeem discovering he has a son back in Queens that is heir to his thrown (Despite fathering three more than capable daughters with Lisa McDowel), Coming 2 America has a similar love story to it’s original. It also has a huge theme about the love of family which I dug.
Like most sequels that come out decades after it’s original, the movie is littered with references to the original, which did not wear me out as I thought it would as I was really happy to see so many faces from the first film. I will say all the jokes from the first film are in this film and are updated for 2021 (all except one bit that I guess makes sense cause it’s just too 80s (you’ll understand when you see the film).
They added all the old characters they could (Rest In Peace Marge St. Claire). I mean they even called back Garcelle Beauvais who was barely an actress when she had a small part as a flower girl in the original, just to be a full fledge actress now doing a cameo still tossing those flowers. All that and they had a big stable of new ones they had to put in the mix, but it works cause everyone was funny and charismatic.
The great modern day fairy tale did not even need and update but it got it and it was great!
