108 min | PG-13 | March 4, 2021 | Amazon Studios
Prince Akeem returns to Queens to find the bastard son he never knew he had and drag him back to Zamunda. The throne needs a male heir, and the script needs a reason to exist. It finds the first and fakes the second.
Akeem Joffer is now a husband, a father of three daughters, and an heir to the throne of Zamunda. His dying father wants a male successor. So Akeem learns he fathered a son during his one wild night in Queens decades ago, and he flies back to America to retrieve him. The film is a sequel that knows the original by heart and treats that knowledge as a substitute for invention. It builds its entire structure around reversing the first movie and then revisiting every set piece the audience remembers.
Eddie Murphy plays Akeem with the warmth intact and the danger gone. He is a settled king now, and Murphy plays the contentment without finding new comic terrain inside it. Arsenio Hall returns as Semmi and slides back into the old rhythm of straight-man exasperation. Jermaine Fowler plays Lavelle Junson, the discovered son, with eagerness that the script never sharpens into a real character. Leslie Jones plays his mother Mary with volume and commitment that the writing cannot match. Wesley Snipes plays General Izzi as a strutting warlord and steals every scene by treating the cartoon as a genuine threat.
Craig Brewer directs from a script by Barry W. Blaustein, David Sheffield, and Kenya Barris. The film leans hardest on Ruth E. Carter’s costume design, which dresses the Zamundan court in saturated golds and bold geometric prints that give the frame more life than the jokes do. The camera lingers on those garments because they carry the spectacle the script declines to provide. The barbershop ensemble returns under heavy prosthetics, and the makeup work is the punchline as often as the dialogue is. Brewer stages the callbacks faithfully and adds nothing that the first film did not already do better.
This is a sequel that mistakes recognition for comedy. Every laugh it lands is a laugh the original earned first, and the film simply replays the receipt. The new material around Lavelle and the question of inheritance has a real idea buried in it. Brewer never digs it out because the movie would rather flatter your memory than test it.