Murphy’s story plays like a comedic collection of observational folklore, albeit one that’s rammed and trimmed and truncated in the tight package of eighties comedic conventions. It both lampoons and embraces a slick preacher with a hustle (played by Hall) and a cheesy R. The movie sends up, with an admiring wink, the Black businessman Cleo McDowell (John Amos), with his proudly shameless fast-food knockoff McDowell’s, and it mocks the Black inheritor-bourgeois in the person of Darryl Jenks (Eriq La Salle), whom Cleo is setting up with his daughter Lisa (Shari Headley), who, however, falls in love with Akeem. The barbershop that’s the social center of the poor neighborhood where Akeem chooses to live is where the pair hold court-Murphy as the barber Clarence and also as the kvetchy old Jewish man Saul, and Hall as the barber Morris. Prince Akeem makes his way through Queens, in the company of his wingman-valet Semmi (Arsenio Hall), to put Black life in a loving, satirical light. The joy of the original is that its fish-out-of-water story puts the emphasis less on the fish than on the new atmosphere that he has to cope with. The bulk of the comedy is situational, emerging from Prince Akeem’s comedic ignorance of both American life and the ordinary working world-yet his lofty perspective gives rise to a second layer of comedy that is an even greater showcase for Murphy, who also wrote the story. Rather, its subject is generational-the liberation of a son from the stifling tradition that his parents maintain. In the 1988 version, the political stakes are low the fictional country of Zamunda has no apparent problem with its monarchy (the king, Jaffe Joffer, is played by James Earl Jones his wife, Queen Aoleon, by the late Madge Sinclair). The story, of a pampered royal attempting to live like a commoner, is a venerable theme, rung most familiarly in “The Student Prince.” The premise is democratic by nature-it assumes that isolation and ignorance beset those in power, and suggests that a dose of life among the people (and a romantic attachment to one of them) will not just make the royal heir happier but, more important, make the ruler empathize with the subjects’ needs. The new film (available on Amazon, starting Friday) finds a few of its most inspired moments where it revises the plot to reflect current sensibilities, but its strained efforts at reviving the characters and situations of the original make it feel both hollow and leaden. A case in point is “Coming 2 America,” an update of the comedy, from 1988, that gave Eddie Murphy a showcase for his wide-ranging comedic artistry. What puts comedy to sleep isn’t the respectfulness that wrongly gets derided as political correctness it’s nostalgia, which provides the false good feelings that turn comedy into self-satisfaction.
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