I believe I saw this when it came out in 1988 and I’ve watched in on line since, most recently yesterday. Meh. The Wikipedia entry quotes Shelia Benson of the Los Angelis Times as saying it was “hollow and wearying Eddie Murphy fairy tale.” Wikipedia’s summary of the plot: “Eddie Murphy plays Akeem Joffer, the crown prince of the fictional African nation of Zamunda, who travels to the United States in the hopes of finding a woman he can marry and will love him for who he is, not for his status or for having been trained to please him.”
I have little idea of how a wealthy hereditary African ruler lives these days, but the Zamunda stuff seemed over-the-top silly. The Queens material was better. But even there it was built around a central gag that just lay there. Prince Akeem fell in love with a woman, Lisa McDowell, whose father, Cleo McDowell, owned a burger joint called McDowell’s, that looked pretty much like a McDonald’s. There was some business about the play on “McDonald’s,” but not enough to be at all interesting.
My favorite moment came when Akeem was walking with Lisa in the early evening. He had a wad of money in his pocket he wanted to get rid of – does it matter why? – so he stuffed it in the coat pocket of a bum he saw sprawled in the street. It turns out that bum was a down-and-out Mortimer Bellamy from the 1983 Trading Places, a much better film, by the way, much. Perhaps that’s why I sent to see Coming to America, that, plus the fact that 48 Hrs. (from 1982) and Beverly Hills Cop (1984) were also good movies. But that one gag had nothing to do with the plot. It just reminded us that Murphy had been in better films and Coming to America.
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