Nutty Professor II: The Klumps

I could probably count on one hand how many movie sequels are anything other than a complete waste of everybody's time. The Nutty Professor II is no exception, and I would go as far as to say that the 2 minutes of outtakes are probably funnier than the rest of the film combined.

The original was a definite success and featured one of Eddie Murphy's career-best performances. Unfortunately, the follow-up is little more than a lazy cash-grab that sucks the life out of the previously hilarious Klumps with a barrage of crass toilet humour. The storyline is absolutely atrocious and it culminates in a completely nonsensical ending. Murphy does just enough to make this film watchable but even he can't make up for such a bad script.

If you enjoyed the first movie, you'd be better off re-watching it than putting yourself through this. Really lame stuff and a massive insult to its excellent predecessor.

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.

This cannot measure up to the first film - the first with Eddie Murphy, that is, not the Jerry Lewis film from 1963. (Actually, this doesn't measure up to the Lewis film, either.)

For me, the biggest disappointment was the "family" scenes in which Murphy plays almost all the roles including old ladies. In the first film, some of that was absolutely hilarious, the highlight of the movie. Here, that isn't the case. Also, some of the dialog is almost impossible to decipher. It's also too raunchy and this film should have been rated "R." A PG-13 rating is ridiculous with all the emphasis on sex. I hate to see kids watch movies like this.

Still, this had a decent share of funny moments. Also, to its credit, it is not as mean-spirited as the first film turned out to be. Still, the bad outweighs the good. It needed to be funnier, and less raunchy.

I expected to see lots of variations of the humor that The Nutty Professor (the Murphy version) used in the classic scene of the Klumps at the dinner table. Instead, what little humor this sequel had split time with disgust as the movie went mostly for sexy granny jokes.

The sad thing is, more fart humor would have been an *improvement.* This movie was boring. It was uninteresting. It missed numerous opportunities to have some fun. And it spent too much time showing off make-up and not enough time being entertaining.

Perhaps most painful to watch was Eddie Murphy just being Eddie Murphy (as Buddy Love). I never understand why some actors/directors think that if a character screams real loud and makes a face, it's funny. It is especially not funny when it happens 2-3 times. In the first movie, Buddy Love was funny (if cruel), and his observations were right on target. In The Klumps, Love is like a grown version of that Home Alone kid, when he grabs his face and just yells at the camera. Uh, if you are done shouting now, can we move on?

Janet Jackson was fluff. And I don't know what she has done with her chest, but it seems unusually huge here.

I suppose it would be appropriate to say how well done the make up is as Murphy plays his half-dozen or so characters. Yes, he makes them seem like different people, at least superficially. But none of the characters are really there, you know? They each have little tag lines, and maybe a quirk, and those lines and that quirk are used to death. Take the granny. Yep, she likes sex. She is a sex machine. She wants every man. OK, uh, so? We've seen that 20 times. Can we get to something new?

Overall, I feel sad to see the level Murphy's wit has been reduced to. He used to be more biting, more insightful and more, well, funny. Now he is a human cartoon. I gave this movie a 4.

This was not a funny movie. Eddie Murphy who has starred in movies such as "Coming To America" and "Beverly Hills Cop" which were both hilarious, has struck out here in the poorest fashion possible.

"The Nutty Professor" (1996) was okay because of the use of the Klump family who appeared throughout the movie every so often breaking it up with some humorous scenes. In "The Klumps", the family were over used and relied on for all the laughs, but instead just became sickening and in turn extremely boring. I understand using the Klump family was the idea for the sequel, it's just that it doesn't come close to working.