One of the casualties of the 2020 movie season was Coming 2 America, which Paramount took off their release calendar, then sold to Amazon. Now, however, Coming 2 America is finally coming to the world as an Amazon release in March 2021.
The first trailer has dropped and it’s a nostalgia-fest reminding us of how f-cking FUNNY Arsenio Hall and Eddie Murphy were in Coming to America. In the sequel, arriving 33 years after the original, Akeem and Semmi must return to America to find Akeem’s long-lost son. That’s the extent of the plot revealed in the trailer, but it doesn’t even matter because the hook is Eddie and Arsenio and the arsenal of characters they play.
I must have watched Coming to America a hundred times as a kid, it was one of those movies that was always just ON. (Do Kids These Days have this experience of absorbing pop culture because certain things were just constantly on television?) Murphy and Hall playing all the side characters was tremendously funny to me as a kid, so it brings back the warm fuzzies to watch this trailer and laugh out loud. But it’s not just nostalgia getting to me, there is a solid joke in that barbershop clip when Clarence ejects the young guy out of his chair for going too hard on the Africa jokes. There’s not much else here, as the trailer is mostly emphasizing the reunion of Murphy and Hall and all the characters they play, but these moments, plus the way Semmi goes “Oh hell no” when Akeem says they’re going back to America, are solid. It’s a great reminder of the particular chemistry Murphy and Hall have, and the give-and-take of wide-eyed Akeem and cynical Semmi. I missed these two! Also, I am very interested to find out if Soul Glo is still around in the 2020s. It’s an iconic brand!
