Title: Nutty Professor II, The: The Klumps
Rating: **1/2 (out of 4)
Review: I've never been a die-hard Eddie Murphy fan, but that's of course not to say that he isn't funny or endearing, either. TRADING PLACES has always been my favorite Murphy movie, with the original BEVERLY HILLS COP a close second. He's a funny guy, and he has come further than he ever has had before with NUTTY II. The original 1996 film was both funny and enjoyable, if having the distinction of having occasional unnecessary bathroom humor. NUTTY II, however, is taken to extremes with the bathroom humor, everywhere from Grandma Klump giving Buddy Love oral sex in a hot tub to a hamster growing to epic proportions giving anal sex to Klump's boss, this film revels in bad taste way too much. Is the film funny? Sure it is, and it would have been a lot funnier if not for all the sickenening humor that we've seen dozens of times before (I don't blame Murphy particularly for this, considering the script was co-written by the guys who wrote AMERICAN PIE, and directed by Peter Segal, who has had his fair share of films with the same type of humor). They don't make the sick humor at least clever, which is the problem. THERE'S SOMETHING ABOUT MARY and BASEKETBALL made their bathroom humor clever, but NUTTY II doesn't.
Murphy fans are sure to love this, though, because I was telling the truth before about him coming further than he ever has before. Playing no less than 8 roles (this might be some kind of record), his main character is Sherman Klump, a charmingly overweight professor who, in the original wanted to get rid of all the weight and became a stud in Buddy Love to make a beautiful co-ed (Jada Pinkett, whose missing prescence in the sequel is annoyingly unexplained) and eventually learns in the end that you should be yourself and that personality is way more important about looks. In the sequel, he can't shake off the DNA that Buddy has left inside of him, so he decides to attempt to get rid of it, but Buddy eventually (and predictably) regenerates himself with a new thing on his mind. Sherman, apparantly, has discovered the fountain of youth, and now Buddy is going to stop him and take the invention to his own credit. This film, apart from the original, focuses more on Sherman's family, right down to their gluttonous eating habits to their sexual fantasies. That's basically the whole plot in a nutshell. As I've said before, Murphy is terrific, and he's well worth watching in his eight roles, but this film will turn off a lot of viewers because all the sick humor, which I must say is more silly than funny, yet you find yourself for some reason still laughing to it (or rather, at it). Janet Jackson, as Eddie's love interest here, is OK, but she seems to be more important to the audience (any audience, not just the African-American audience) as a male fantasy figure than an actress. Overall, I'm looking at this film as another one to add to Murphy's list of commercial successes that is funny enough to make him a respectable comedian, but for once I want him to go more towards not grossing us out and finding a concept to appeal to anyone and everyone.
