scott29's Full Review: Nutty Professor II: The Klumps
While the original 'Nutty' was a slight, sweet and very funny affair, the sequel avoids any semblance of what made the first one a pretty darn good comedy. Unfunny jokes are fired at an assaulting pace, while Murphy takes on 7 different roles and fails at breathing any real fun into any of them. It's as if the writers and director Peter Segal decided to accentuate the worst facets of the original film and just amplify them a hundred fold.
If you found yourself cringing at the site of the preview for this movie (as I did), stay far away. While nobody would argue the talent of Eddie Murphy, why he chooses to mire himself in dreck like this is truly astounding. (OK yeah, the money. I know, but he'd get big bucks in GOOD roles too!) Big-budget Hollywood moviemaking strikes again, resulting in a truly foul movie. This assembly-line, crank 'em out junk is simply one of the worst sequels ever made.
Amiable Professor Klump is once again feeling the presence of his rampant id, which is annoyingly personified by alter-ego Buddy Love. Buddy spews out some nasty sex talk at the most inopportune moments, such as when Klump tries to propose to his girlfriend, played by a dull Janet Jackson. When Klump tries to extract Buddy from his DNA, "wackiness" ensues. Buddy is reborn, but his DNA was mixed with that of a dog (don't ask), so he's prone to <get this!> act like a dog! If that's not hysterical enough, Klump gets dumber the longer he's away from Buddy!
Of course the brain-dead plot veers off (often!) into equally ridiculous sub-plots. Yes, the foul-mouthed granny is back, and if you found her few vulgar mumblings in Nutty 1 amusing, be prepared to rethink that. She's almost the main character in this movie, and with her massive flopping breasts and disgustingly toothless grin, I can't imagine a more unpleasant person to feature in a movie. While Murphy occasionally comes up with a good gag for granny, they are easily overshadowed by the sheer awfulness of her character as a whole.
Director Peter Segal chooses to employ a 'Point & Shoot' method of directing, making the movie seem particularly cheap. He seems willing to leave all the real work up to hundreds of special effects guys and Eddie Murphy. The result is a sloppy and dull movie that will keep you squirming in your seat and checking your watch.
Basically, Nutty Professor 2 is a Saturday Night Live movie, only the original skit didn't come from SNL. It came from Nutty 1. The brief "Klumps" sequence was simply hysterical the first time around. The fact that Eddie Murphy could handle all these roles (also amazing in a technical sense) was astonishing, and the 'dinner table' scene itself was just straight out funny!
The thinking for the sequel was obviously to blow up that one 7-minute scene into a feature length, no different than movies like Superstar or A Night at the Roxbury. The result of stretching something this thin so far is obvious: It breaks. For every one fart joke in the original, there are 15 here. That's how sequels are made!
The main problem is that of the script. Co-written by the Weitz brothers (of American Pie fame), they seem fully intent on filling every single scene with a reference to either big noisy farts, massive erections or huge floppy boobs. I'm not saying this kind of thing couldn't be funny, but that it's just not funny in this movie. Gross-out humor is best when it's doled out sparingly. But when your movie's 'big scene' is a giant hamster shooting mega-doody at people before anally raping a college dean, something's amiss. Equally as mystifying is how a movie so gleefully crass and vulgar could escape with a PG-13 rating. I certainly wouldn't want to explain all the raunchy sex jokes to a 14-year old.
The movie just fails at so many basic levels, most of which could be forgiven if it were just funny! Desperately frantic and gross does not automatically equal funny. Based on the unpleasant audience reaction around me, I was not alone in my thinking.
Even Eddie Murphy seems off here. As Buddy Love, he does nothing more than howl loudly and smile an idiot's grin. As Sherman, he sticks with the sweet and mumbly approach. Yawn. As his feuding parents, he's just creepy. There are actually a few scenes that seem to be trying for real romance or something, until you realize that Eddie is kissing himself only with huge fake boobs. Suffice to say that it shatters the illusion when he tries to make these grotesque caricatures into actual three-dimensional characters, complete with syrupy dramatic music.
The Klumps is an animal you're familiar with. It's a sequel to a movie that was an unexpected smash, which means the sequel was a priority of commerce, and not entertainment. Eddie took what was one of the brighter points of his career, and turned it into slop. I guess if the old credo of "Less is More" is true, then let's go a step further and say that "More is Less". It may not be always true, but it serves my purpose here. While it's sure to be a huge box office-smash, Eddie Murphy should really try something harder than just wearing make-up. He's too damn funny too be hidden in swill like this.
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