a sluggish return for Eddie Murphy

It is therefore finally on the Prime Video platform, rather than in the theaters where it was to be exploited in 2020, that the late sequel to one of the great comic successes of the 1980s is discovered, A prince in New York (1988), by the facetious John Landis (director of the legendary Blues Brothers in 1980), with Eddie Murphy in the title role. This cover revives the distant memory of a very nice film which sometimes hit the mark but did not invent powder. The story of the heir to the throne of a prosperous African kingdom, Prince Akeem, who preferred to leave with his faithful friend Semmi to seek his wife on his own in New York, rather than marry the bride than his royal parents had chosen him. There he found, under the tinsel of an immigrant worker in run-down Queens, the charming daughter of a greedy manager of a fast-food chain, McDowell, crudely distinguishing McDonald’s.

Sluggish intrigue, atrocious music, hideous settings, outrageous play, A prince in New York, to tell the truth, started from far enough to win. The film was especially the occasion, for Eddie Murphy and his sidekick the comic Arsenio Hall, of a rather funny transformist performance in several roles at the same time, such that of the nerdy soul singer Randy Watson, at the head of his Sexual Chocolates. As for the film itself, it rose to the challenge of an almost entirely African-American distribution, while remaining cautiously at a distance from a disruptive identity or political claim.

Explicitly put at the service of a typical Hollywood storytelling (the hidden billionaire who falls in love with a simple girl), A prince in New York thus marked an important step in the naturalization of the black presence on American screens, and anticipated in many respects, albeit in comic fashion, the Black Panther (2018), by Ryan Coogler, about as politically correct as him. A prince in New York finally asked to be read in the mode of autobiographical presentiment, as Eddie Murphy’s mise en abyme in his role as the new Prince of Hollywood (see An armchair for two, The Flic of Beverly Hills, Dr. Dolittle…), A status so mismanaged, unlike his hero, that he was quickly and painfully deposed.

Relooked and musical

Thirty-three years later, the return of Murphy, 59, to princely affairs in A prince in New York 2 (Coming 2 America) would it be the sign of a resurrection? It would be an exaggeration to say so. Craig Brewer, the director of this sequel, was obviously content to take the program to the letter, that of pure fantasy, good-natured spirit, brand placement and total harmlessness. Revamped up to date, the film is significantly more musical (wide range of black music), more politically correct too, adding to its irenic negritude a touch of feminism felt. A supposedly missing scene from the first volume, shown here in flashback, constitutes the touchstone: under the influence of the substance that makes him smoke a plump girl in a nightclub, Akeem dispenses and refuse to willingly his royal seed and tidies the projection under the carpet of amnesia. It is therefore to find his “bastard” of son that the prince who has become king, father of three daughters and without a male heir, re-embarks for New York.

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