Coming To America (1988)

The Washington Post 6 of 10
You won't believe it: Eddie Murphy, King of the Expletive, playing a good-natured, romantic lead and African king of the jungle...Confined to being a nice guy, a royal nice guy, he precludes himself from the kind of comedy his fans would expect. What you get instead is a light, slow-moving love story only scantly peppered with laughs...In "Eddie Murphy Raw," the comedian's misogynic and remarkably unfunny concert movie, Murphy expressed a desire to meet a woman who knew nothing of his millions and who wouldn't take up the lifestyles of the rich and famous as soon as he married her. He figured only an African tribal woman would fit the bill...Well, here he acts out that fantasy, only in slightly altered form: Murphy is the African, and the Ideal Murphy Woman, he figures, is American. He's Prince Akeem, sole heir to the rich, fictional kingdom of Zamunda -- a soundstage Busch Gardens: The Dark Continent, where benevolent wild animals roam and where Prince Eddie, er, Akeem, basks in the extravagant attention of his slaves. They serenade him when he awakes, sponge him (all over) in the bath and strew petals in his path. But now that he's 21, it's time for an arranged bride, say his sovereign parents...This lightweight vehicle spends most of its time lugging exposition; and the main lugger is romantic lead Murphy, whose comic energies are thus wasted. Hall, former nutty-witty host of Fox Television's "The Late Show," is not allowed to strut his stuff or play off Murphy. Most of the laughs are invested in the subsidiary (and broader) characters, some of them played by Murphy and Hall in disguise. The main pleasure in "America" comes in the romancing of prince and pauper. But the comedy is a mere handmaiden. - Desson Howe
 
The Onion A.V. Club 8 of 10
In 1983's Trading Places, Eddie Murphy plays a pauper who becomes a prince of finance. In 1988's Coming To America, he plays a prince who masquerades as a pauper to find his ideal wife. Both films cleaned up at the box office during Murphy's Reagan-era heyday, and both let director John Landis channel Frank Capra. Trading Places taps into the farcical prankster side of Capra's persona--Landis describes it as his version of a '30s-style "social comedy"--in its irreverent tale of a small-time con man (Murphy) who trades places with stuffy uber-WASP Dan Aykroyd at the whim of playfully perverse tycoon brothers Ralph Bellamy and Don Ameche. America, meanwhile, shares Capra's fondness for moral comedies about pure-hearted innocents who'd rather make their own way in the world than blindly follow tradition...Bellamy and Ameche reprise their battling-brothers characters for a goofy in-joke cameo in Coming To America, a disarmingly sweet fish-out-of-water comedy in which Murphy's good-natured African prince toils as a janitor at a fast-food restaurant in Queens while wooing the pretty daughter of owner John Amos. Murphy and sidekick Arsenio Hall--whose scene-stealing performance here seemed to promise a dazzling film career that never materialized--famously donned Rick Baker's makeup to play multiple characters, but unlike in Norbit, the effect is sweet and affectionate rather than grotesque and scatological. Murphy would soon exhaust the comic possibilities inherent in donning layers of latex to become a one-man lowbrow vaudeville extravaganza, but his shtick still felt fresh here, probably because there's an awful lot of heart hiding under all the prosthetics. - Nathan Rabin