Movie Review – Ernest Goes to Africa

Ernest Goes to Africa (1997)
Written and directed by John Cherry

The Ernest franchise felt like it was running on fumes at this point. It had been ten years since Ernest Goes to Camp. Touchstone/Disney were out of the picture. The films were no longer being released theatrical, going straight to video. Budgets were meager. The ideas were also drying up. When this film came out, I was sixteen, and I don’t have any vivid memory of watching it. Our family likely rented it for the younger siblings, and I was probably present, but I remembered very little of it. John Cherry was writing & directing solo now. Film production had gone from Tennessee to Vancouver and South Africa for these final two pictures.

Ernest (Jim Varney) is a mechanic who accidentally demolishes a car, losing his job. Trying to get his spirits back up, he goes to the nearby diner and asks his crush, Renee (Linda Kash), out on a date. She turns him down, saying she wants someone more adventurous. He thinks a gift might woo her, and while visiting a flea market, Ernest buys two jewels. These have been stolen from a remote tribe in Central Africa. Ernest gets caught up in the adventure Renee was talking about as the various factions vying for these artifacts chase after him. It’s not until halfway through the picture that Ernest officially ends up in Africa.

It’s undeniable by this point that Jim Varney is getting older; he was 46 at the time. He’d been playing Ernest for seventeen years and simply wasn’t as able to do physical comedy as he had years prior. The cancer that would take his life three years later was working its way through his system, slowing him down. He seems more fragile, and thus, we don’t approach the slapstick bits with humor but a slight sense of worry for this middle-aged man pushing himself harder than he probably should at the time. I don’t think I have to explain why that’s not the optimum mood to be in while watching an Ernest flick.

There’s an interest in disregarding Varney and his Ernest character as “low cinema.” I can see the connection between Ernest’s character and the work of silent comedians and their descendants. What Varney is doing is in the tradition of film comedy, so I don’t think those early movies are just garbage heap trash. They certainly aren’t masterpieces but decent family/kid flicks. This era of the franchise is just dreck, with stories that will bore children to tears and a severe lack of momentum. Scenes just linger without punchlines, and there are large chunks of the movie where Ernest isn’t present. The characters we are stuck with are far less compelling.

Throughout the Touchstone era, Disney insisted on keeping Ernest as a sexless character. This meant not even having love interests. Of the four Touchstone-produced movies, only Ernest Goes to Jail features a lady for Ernest to earn the heart of. It doesn’t work there and never worked the subsequent times it was tried. Ernest Goes to Africa might be the worst because there are numerous scenes without him and just Renee. Linda Kash may be a hilarious comedian in her own right, but she is not shining brightly in these films with this material.

Everything about Ernest Goes to Africa feels like someone intentionally trying to not make a family film. There are so many gun-wielding and knife-wielding criminals in this movie that aren’t played as cartoons. Cherry apparently wanted to put Ernest in some real peril, so he’s up against genuine murderers. This also further justifies racist tropes about Africa as being a ‘savage’ and ‘lawless” place. Like any other continent, there are regions where criminals can operate more in the open than others. You wouldn’t know this from Ernest Goes to Africa as it portrays the continent as rife with dark-skinned killers. There are even implications that one character, Bazoo, wants to sexually assault Renee, which I was shocked to see in an Ernest picture.

At one point, Renee is kidnapped into Prince Kazim’s harem. To rescue her, Ernest slathers on darkening make-up, wraps a towel around his head to make a turban, and begins talking in a stereotypical South Asian/Indian accent. While Varney was incredibly talented at reproducing the Southern dialects of the region he grew up in, his non-American accents were always caricatured more than recreated. When it was English or Australian, it was more tolerable because those aren’t marginalized groups. When you are a majority white film production and your lead actor is doing brownface then you have certainly lost the plot at minimum. 

Later, when Ernest encounters the tribe to whom the jewels belong, he attempts to communicate with them through 1970s (and some 90s) U.S. “jive talk.” He calls them “homies.” You watch this and think that Varney had to know how awful it was. He had worked in the theater and in Hollywood. This was 1997, not a time when anyone could claim legitimate naivety about the history and conflict surrounding race in both the United States and South Africa, where the film was shot. Everything about the picture is limp, lifeless, and embarrassing.

It seemed very evident that the Ernest franchise wouldn’t last much longer. There was one more film before Varney’s cancer would overtake him. That would be shot back to back with this one. It was also shot in South Africa due to what I assume were some tax breaks. While previous entries were never perfect it is shocking to see Ernest Saves Christmas or Ernest Scared Stupid and then something like this. I would argue this wouldn’t even be good enough to cut up as a TV series. The production quality and writing are that bad. It would seem Ernest’s legacy would conclude in the most disappointing fashion.