An average movie

To be honest, I wasn’t really sure what to expect from this flick but, since there was a decent cast involved, I thought I might as well check it out. First of all, when I first saw ‘Coming to America’, I didn’t like it at all but I had the opportunity to re-watch it before this sequel and I have to admit that it was better than I remembered. I still don’t think it was one of Murphy’s best movies but I finally could understand why it was so popular though. However, did it really require a sequel more than 30 years later? At least, it was promising that it was directed by Craig Brewer who also gave us 'Dolemite Is My Name', easily the best thing Murphy did during the last 30 years. Well, unfortunately, I’m afraid I didn’t care much about this sequel though. I think the main mistake they made was to have most of the action taking place in Zamunda. Indeed, while I was re-watching ‘Coming to America’, pretty much everything taking place in New York was fairly entertaining but everything taking place in Zamunda was actually ACrather cringe-inducing, even borderline offensive when you watched this movie decades later. Well, with this sequel, they flipped the concept by bringing Akeem’s son from Queens to Zamunda but, even though the concept made sense, it meant that most of the action had to take place there which was a huge mistake. Sure, they tried to tone down the offensiveness of the material. For example, the rose-bearers didn’t have to constantly through petals following the prince and they also tried to show that Akeem’s daughters were strong (which didn’t really work since two of them had nothing to do through the whole duration) but, as far as I was concerned, it was still more offensive than really entertaining. At some point, Ryan Coogler did a pitch which was rejected by Eddy Murphy and I really wonder what he would have done with this material. Anyway, to make it work, they should have hired either a African writer or someone with some deep knowledge about the African continent instead of churning out some barely entertaining stereotypes which already felt outdated when the previous movie was released more than 30 years ago. Anyway, to conclude, even if the damned thing was rather harmless, it was still rather weak and I don’t think it is really worth a look. 

5/10