Coming 2 America (2021)

Sequels arrive on a schedule dictated by nostalgia and actuarial tables, and Coming 2 America is a patient specimen of the form. Thirty-three years after Prince Akeem first crossed the ocean in search of a bride, the film returns him to Queens to retrieve a son he did not know he had fathered, a ticket scalper named Lavelle. The machinery is familiar: the fish out of water, the barbershop, the returning cast assembled like a reunion photograph. Craig Brewer directs with the amiable competence of a man who knows the assignment is continuity, not invention.

The narrative engine this time is succession. Zamundan law permits only a male heir, which leaves Akeem's capable daughter Meeka sidelined while the throne is dangled before a stranger from Queens. The film resolves this by amending the law, a tidy concession to contemporary expectations about inheritance and gender. The princesses, it turns out, are trained staff fighters, and they subdue an invading army while the men negotiate. This is a moral delivered gently, more shrug than sermon, and the comedy never surrenders the floor to it.

Where the film registers its cultural moment is in its casting and its setting. The ensemble is overwhelmingly Black, drawing on African and African-American performers alike, and the contrast between Zamundan formality and Queens pragmatism is played for warmth instead of grievance. A passing reference to gentrification lands and then moves on. The picture has no interest in climate, in wealth, in bodies, in neurodivergence, or in rewriting history. It wants to be a family comedy, and it succeeds at being one. The result is agreeable, unhurried, and content to leave the heavier arguments to other films.