Nutty Professor II: The Klumps review : Outrageously funny
(This review was first published in 2000)
I found this a very funny film. I had to wipe away tears of laughter at times and saw a few others do the same. If you fancy lots of good belly laughs, and are prepared to forfeit your right to a plausible plot, then this is a film you should enjoy.
Due to popular demand, Eddy Murphy revives and strengthens the Klump family characters that featured just briefly in, The Nutty Professor. Personally, I feel that if they’d gone the whole hog, ditched the nutty professor story altogether, and featured the entire Klump family with a new plot, the film would have been better. As it is, the Klump family steal the show and the ludicrous plot borders on being a party pooper.
The premise of the plot is that the affable, but grossly overweight, and strangely non-nutty professor Sherman Klump, invents a formula for rejuvenating human beings. A so-called youth formula which he tries to sell to a drug company. A beautiful colleague (played by Janet Jackson) who is working on gene extraction, has fallen in love with him - pretty unlikey but whatever.
Buddy love, is Sherman’s alter ego and is a legacy from his previous slimming formula in the first Nutty Professor film. He is the antithesis of Sherman’s amiable personality and after using the potion their opposing personalities merge with predictable results.
When “Buddy” suddenly starts to rear his ugly head by causing the perfect gentleman to intermittently slip into vulgarities, he becomes concerned that he will lose her love. So he combines their research in an attempt to create a formula to extract the body squatter.
Due to a particularly implausible set of circumstances, Buddy love becomes an independent entity, tries to steal the youth formula, and generally takes on the role of bad guy.
If you haven’t seen the first film, then as there is no reference to Buddy Love in this one you would no doubt be left wondering who the hell Buddy Love was, and more importantly, how he got inside our hero Sherman Klump. I’ll explain.
In the first film, Professor Klump had invented a formula to make him thin. This formula, like his youth one, was unstable so the effects were short lived. When he drank that formula he metamorphosed into a very slim, but arrogant and vulgar person who called himself Buddy love. This whole concept is derived from the film of the same name starring Jerry Lewis, but there the similarities end.
So, back to the Nutty Professor II. Sherman’s family are a disparate bunch of misfits, all played impressively by Eddie Murphy. As well as Sherman, he plays his brother, father, mother, grandmother and Buddy Love. The latter basically being the real Eddie Murphy in full obnoxious mode.
The brother character was the least funny but in a way the most impressive. I spent the entire film trying to decide if it was really him or not. His mother was very good too but the best, and funniest, characters are his impotent father and his nymphomaniac geriatric grandmother. Eddie deserves an Oscar for the hilarious performance of the grandmother and there are several outrageously funny situations with her.
The make up department will no doubt win awards as although there are many close up shots of the obese Sherman, it is virtually impossible to distinguish between the real and the false skin on Eddie Murphy’s face.
Much of the humour is puerile and vulgar but it works well if you aren’t too uptight to enjoy it. It is rated 12 and actually has some poignant moments in it. There are morals and lessons to learn for those who look deeper.
If you want a good laugh, don’t care about plot feasibility and like Eddy Murphy, then you should enjoy this film. Actually, I do care about plot feasibility, in fact I get easily annoyed when plots are ridiculous, but this film was funny enough to allow me to cut it some slack. I sat back for the ride - and laughed most of the way.
Written by Andy(ArT)Trigg on April 14th, 2008 with
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