COMING 2 AMERICA
Three reasons why we’re excited for our return to Zamunda
MURPHY’S SWEETEST CHARACTER
Eddie Murphy has played a zillion turbo-mouthed, profanity-dispensing characters, most recently in last year’s Dolemite Is My Name, in which he proclaimed the immortal line, “Dolemite is my name, and fuckin’ up motherfuckers is my game.” But the gentle-natured, romantic yet still effervescent Prince Akeem, his hero from 1988’s Coming To America, is a one-off. The original movie saw Akeem turn down his designated bride-to-be and head to New York to find true love. And this sequel, directed by Craig Brewer, promises to deepen the character, as he returns to Queens to find the son he never knew he had. Altogether now: “GOOD MORNING, MY NEIGHBOURS!”
A BELOVED KINGDOM
Way before Wakanda became cinema’s buzziest fictional African country, Zamunda captured filmgoers’ imaginations. Ruled over by James Earl Jones, it featured elephants running free, an intricate royal-court dance number (choreographed by Paula Abdul), and a flag so cool you can buy it online. Coming 2 America will head back to Zamunda and expand the mythology; while much remains under wraps, we know that Akeem is set to become king, and Babar the elephant will be back, all grown up.
A CRACKERJACK CAST
As Dolemite Is My Name proved again, Murphy is at his best when bouncing off an ensemble of very funny people. Which makes this sequel a truly exhilarating prospect. Arsenio Hall is back as Akeem’s redoubtable sidekick, Semmi, but check out the list of new faces in the Zamundaverse: Tracy Morgan, Leslie Jones, Morgan Freeman (hey, he was funny in The Lego Movie!) and Wesley Snipes, who just about stole the show in Dolemite. And let’s not forget the bonus Murphy characters: if early word is to believed, come Christmas we’ll be treated to a second bar of Sexual Chocolate. Start salivating now.
EDGAR WRIGHT HAS dabbled in horror before, of course. Just look at the way Shaun Of The Dead
slowly spirals into full-blown zom, rather than full-blown com, for its last ten minutes. Or the giallo-inspired jump-scarific murders in Hot Fuzz.
Or Nick Frost in a nappy in his trailer for Don’t.
Yet — Frost in a nappy aside — Wright has never made a movie that will haunt your dreams. That could be about to change with Last Night In Soho, his first foray proper into horror. But if you surmised from the title that it might be a stalk ’n’ slash movie set in the bustling heart of London’s West End (cast your minds back pre-pandemic — it definitely bustled), you would be very, very wrong. Wright has made something more ambitious, more enigmatic, more elusive. A film that could bury itself in your subconscious and refuse to move. “It’s an unsettling sort of movie,” he says. “You want to make a film that lingers in the memory. I think about the films I saw once as a child... particular images burned into my memory. Like, the ghost on the other side of the lake in [Jack Clayton’s 1961 horror] The Innocents. It’s only on screen for two seconds, but you remember it forever.”
The exact nature of the images Wright has designed to sear into our synapses won’t become clear until April. And, indeed, the story. But we do know that the film revolves around Thomasin Mckenzie’s Eloise, a young woman with designs on fashioning a career in fashion designing, who somehow finds a way to bridge the gap between modern-day London and the Soho of the 1960s. There, she becomes inextricably entwined in the life of Anya Taylor-joy’s budding singer Sandy, and soon finds that the ’60s aren’t as swinging as promised in the brochure. “If you dream of being in the big city, but haven’t grown up in one, and you come here, it’s uniquely disorientating,” explains Wright. “It feels impossible to crack and penetrate.”
How Eloise and Sandy will interact, and how Matt Smith’s almost certainly shady Jack fits in, will be revealed at a later date. But, after years of pushing the comedy and action envelope with the likes of Shaun Of The Dead, Hot Fuzz and Baby Driver, it’ll be fun to see Wright apply his unique visual approach (fortified here by new DP Chung-hoon Chung) to a brand-new genre, and exercise an entirely new set of directorial muscles. “It will feel very different to my other films,” he says. “But I’ve always liked films which have a slow burn into something else, and a lot of
my movies have that feeling. Last Night starts in a more psychological realm and then starts to get increasingly intense as it goes along. And I always like to gravitate towards making a film in genres I miss, and there’s a certain type of psychological horror film that you got more in the ’60s and ’70s, that have something of an operatic nature. I’m using that kind of visual grammar.”
When Wright first announced the movie, he cited Nicolas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now and Roman Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby in dispatches. But that’s not to say that Last Night In Soho will be a riff on those chilly masterpieces. He’s got something much weirder in mind. “I always liked the idea of doing something in a dream state,” he says. “Something that, in the Venn diagram of Luis Buñuel and A Nightmare On Elm Street, was sort of in the middle.” Now that’s an enticing prospect. Please, do have nightmares.