Nutty Professor 2: The Klumps

The movies almost always suck, yet I still love going. I should know better by now, yet I still get so fucking pissed off I threaten teens in the parking lot after another buttfucking at the hands of Hollywood. I still don't understand how anyone handed a chance to make a movie, and completely waste it on shit like "Mission to Mars" or "Down to You," shit nobody likes. What kind of asshole is given the chance to make a movie, to make something great and memorable, but instead aims for mediocrity or worse? What assholes wouldn't feel a responsibility to make the best movie they could?

The power to make movies is in the hands of the elite. And they don't give a rat's ass. There are millions like me (fuck, I got some really good ideas for movies) who would kill to make a movie, to tell a story and jokes, but we're stuck seeing the visions of a bunch of assholes in fancy suits with unnecessary SUVs who are too fucking phony, stupid and worried about their jobs to make anything good.

Yes, there are people who like the crap they churn out, but fuck them. They don't expect much, watch a lot of ABC sitcoms, love the Olive Garden and don't read. They're the lazy meatheads who say asinine shit like "When I get home from work I'm too tired to think." They don't deserve to have movies made to please them, because a hot poker up the ass would make them just as happy.

"The Nutty Professor II: The Klumps" is perfect for them. It serves up a big hairy-shit portion of lowest-common denominator, and nothing more. It's Hollywood's way of saying "Let's see if you're stupid enough to swallow this."

Eddie Murphy is Sherman Klump, a brilliant professor who has created a youth formula. Murphy also plays Sherman's father, mother, brother and grandmother. They're a big, fat family. Inside of Sherman is Buddy Love, a slick thin guy who wants to destroy Sherman. Meanwhile, Sherman is itching to pork Janet Jackson, a fellow professor. Buddy wants to stop him.

To rid himself of Buddy, Sherman tries to extract him from his genes. Too bad for him, the extracted Buddy comes to life, as another Eddie Murphy character, and Sherman loses his intelligence. Buddy wants Sherman's youth formula so he can sell it, and the extraction Sherman did makes his rapidly lose his intelligence.

"The Klumps" is an excuse for Murphy to play many characters, and he does that pretty fucking well. He has the ability to not only play a fat old man, or a fat younger man, but they're sympathetic. Unlike Martin Lawrence, Murphy cares about the characters as people, and the funniest moments are when he's playing off the sympathy he gets us to feel. It's just too bad there's absolutely nothing going on around him.

The plot is barely there, and the movie doesn't care anyway. It's more than happy to go off on some tangent, chasing down a punchline that it never finds, or isn't funny. There are several fantasy sequences that are so irrelevant to the story that they're confusing. If a movie is going to go way off-story, it better be fucking hilarious. These tangents aren't. In one, Murphy's Sherman character dreams he's in outer space, and we get a lazy "Armageddon" spoof and a painfully long fart joke.

There are dozens of other fart jokes, and multiple references to old women's "titties." The people around me where howling with the laughter of simpletons, but the fact that tits sag with age really isn't clever or worthy of a screenwriter's paycheck. These writers sit in their fucking beach houses thinking, "Well, I can't think of anything, and I'm late for getting my Saab waxed, so I guess I'll just have someone fart."

And the producer, or studio executive who read that fart joke said "That's good enough. Fuck the audience." I swear to God, it can't be hard for Hollywood to find people not obsessed with sagging breasts, elderly sex and poop.

Janet Jackson is pretty un-fucking-believable. She can't act and the look in her eyes is that a drunk lost in a funhouse who fears he won't get out alive. Larry Miller is the school dean who either hates or loves Sherman Klump, depending on what the arbitrary script wants. No matter, because no humor escapes his sour face and snotty voice. He's your friend's scary alcoholic dad, and not an actor.

When it has nothing to say, "The Klumps" does what any spoiled four-year old does: it screams. There are multiple scenes of Murphy as many characters yelling at each other, or talking over each other. Maybe I'm going deaf, but I couldn't even understand what the fuck he was saying. And when I did understand, the joke was that Eddie Murphy was playing several characters. Over and over, the movie wants us to think it's funny that Murphy slaps Murphy, or Murphy calls Murphy fat and stupid. For Good Fuck's sake, seeing two of the same person was dazzling technology when Hayley Mills played twins in "The Parent Trap," but this is 2000 and I shouldn't have to pay to see a movie that thinks it's still amazing.

The writers should be dragged out and flogged for the first hour of the movie. They should then be shot for the con-fucking-founding last half-hour. There are few worse climaxes on film except in the world of amateur porn. An already contrived and stupid plot devolves into pure nonsense. The ending makes so little sense that even the idiots I saw the movie with lost interest. I sat there looking for gags in the mess, but mostly it's just people running around in fat costumes, doing things that are entirely unbelievable and purely at the whim of desperate writers. Who the fuck approved this? How much harder could it have been to write something intelligible?

I would say fuck you, Hollywood, but I know I'll be back at the multiplex next weekend, and they'll shovel another steaming pile of shit down my throat. Hollywood doesn't hate us, it just doesn't care. Two fingers for the "Nutty Professor II."