COMING TO AMERICA
A film review by Mark R. Leeper
Copyright 1988 Mark R. Leeper
Capsule review: John Landis directs Eddie Murphy and
makes a film that reminds one of Lubitsch and Capra. One of
the most unpromising movies of the year turns out to be the
best comedy since MOONSTRUCK. This is the best film Landis
or Murphy has made to date. Rating: +2.
Let me not mince words. I have liked some of John Landis's films, but too many have seemed like extended comedy sketches. He is generally weak on characters and weaker on storyline. Eddie Murphy is a standup comic who can be funny but whose films have had little of quality beyond his jokes. His acting range is dwarfed even by John Wayne's. Both Landis and Murphy are symbolic of what is going wrong with screen comedy. The only current comedy I wanted to see less than John Landis's Eddie Murphy comedy COMING TO AMERICA was ARTHUR 2 ON THE ROCKS. Then I heard that COMING TO AMERICA was supposed to be a departure for Landis and Murphy. It got good reviews on television. So I tried it. COMING TO AMERICA is to date the high-water mark for Landis's directorial career and it is the best film Eddie Murphy has ever been in. Even more than BULL DURHAM, it is a throwback to earlier comedies. Watching it, I was reminded of comedies by Lubitsch and Capra, and of stories by O.~Henry. The storyline is simple and predictable like an O.~Henry story, but it is told with warmth.
Prince Akeem of Zamunda--played by Murphy without a lot of smirky highjinks, but with dignity and sincerity--objects to the wife his father (regally played by the great James Earl Jones) has chosen for him. Instead he decides to go to America and find someone he wants. He wants someone with a mind and a will of her own who wants him for himself. This ploy is a familiar one: he will pretend to be a poor man and find a wife like commoners do. With him he takes his faithful servant Semmi. Arsenio Hall plays Semmi so well one wishes the two roles had been reversed.
Landis has assembled a very good cast for this story with Hall, Jones, Shari Headley (very appealing as the woman Murphy wants to marry), and John Amos as her father, who runs an imitation McDonald's restaurant so close that the McDonald's corporation is going to sue him any day. In addition, there are a raft of minor characters who add depth and texture to the film. The liberal sprinkling of minor characters is a characteristic of the good classic comedies but in recent years we see less of it because they take good writing and they take away screen time from the major stars. In COMING TO AMERICA they do away with that problem by having Murphy and Hall play many of the minor characters in Rick Baker's heavy makeup.
Just to show I was not totally bowled over by this film, I will say that there were problems with the scenes in Zamunda. It should be a never- never land, but Zamunda seems more never-never than most. Perhaps my geography is bad, but for a heavily forested African kingdom, the vegetation seemed all wrong. It is a very wealthy kingdom in which baby elephants have the big ears of African elephants, but the adult elephants have the small ears of Indian elephants. On top of all this, the matte work to show the African palace is abominable.
These are definitely quibbles, but they are noticeable and still I give COMING TO AMERICA a strong +2 on the -4 to +4 scale. Landis and Murphy, how about more of the same. (Oh, and you will have no problem finding the reference to SEE YOU NEXT WEDNESDAY.)
Mark R. Leeper
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