Nutty Professor II: The Klumps
**** GM
Starring: Eddie Murphy, Janet Jackson, Larry Miller

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I'll be the first one to admit that farts can be funny, but they have to be done right, and they can't make up a significant portion of the film and still work. This film doesn't really do them right.

Eddie Murphy plays about a million characters in this film, and I wouldn't be surprised if he was also playing Janet Jackson. The story is that somehow Sherman Klump, scientist extraordinaire and huge fat guy, has broken up with Personality-Challenged Hot Girlfriend (Jada Pinkett) from the first one and has hooked up with Slightly-Less-Personality-Challenged Hot Girlfriend (Jackson), who somehow we're supposed to believe is a brilliant scientist, although I couldn't help but thinking of lyrics of hers like "Your smooth and shiny feels so good against my lips, sugar," and other such things when she was playing the super-sweet nice girl Denise Gains. Then Pa and Ma Klump have marital problems, Granny Klump likes her some fuckin', Brother Klump is just a jerk with a character so relatively unimportant that you wonder why they really bothered making Eddie up for the part, and then a littler kid that isn't Eddie Murphy but is still really damn big (Jamal Mixon). Of course, Buddy Love (The Real Slim Shady - er, Eddie Murphy) manages to return to make trouble as well, but through some crazy science mishap, he gets some canine characteristics in his genetic makeup, which makes for some occasionally funny things and occasionally iffy things.

The ridiculous attempts at science here make things really hard to buy into, and the dumb things Genius Sherman does also are a bit difficult to believe. True, this is a wacky fart comedy, so realism is hardly something that's a huge problem, but comedy that's attempting to be based in some reality, like this one, should probably be a tad more intelligent. Or maybe I'm just a dork that's a little too bothered by that.

Eddie Murphy does do a damn good job of being all these different characters and, despite a few moments of vocal slip-ups, he's pretty consistent all the way around. The man is a great actor and a funny guy. He managed to imbue Sherman Klump with a genuine personality that you can absolutely feel for when he's down in the first film, and although it's not quite as effective here, Sherman is still a pretty decently rounded character (I won't even bother saying 'no pun intended,' since the pun would be too lame of a joke for me) with frailties, personality quirks and a real likability that makes it hard to watch when anything bad happens to him.

Unfortunately, the script here doesn't really do the characters much justice. There are some funny bits - and I particularly liked the "playin' catch" bit in the final boardroom scene, and I have to admit that having a giant hamster fuck Larry Miller in the ass wins some points for originality. But there are also pretty humorless fart and turd jokes - I'm not one of those 'farts equal sub-par' people. Farts and poo-poo is funny, but these jokes made them unfunny. Some of the dialog was too fast and garbled to catch, meaning I most likely missed some stuff that might have been funny. I also find it interesting that people in Hollywood think that there are women that look like Janet Jackson on this planet that will date and fall in true magic love with men that look like Sherman Klump. No matter how many interests they share, this will not happen. The same way men that look like Eddie Murphy will not fall in true magic love with women that look like Nell Carter. This does not happen. Life can suck for attractive people - think how badly it can suck for unattractive people.

Though, I guess there's the off-chance that a film like this could make other people think that unattractive people aren't so unattractive... but take a look around at this culture and think again.

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