Verdict: A virtual replay of Murphy's earlier cartoon, keeping pace with the trend in crude comedy.

Details: Starring Eddie Murphy and Janet Jackson. Rated PG-13 for language and sexual references. 1 hour, 45 minutes.

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Review: The key to a successful movie sequel is figuring out what made the original such a hit and repeating it. Leave it to anthropologists to explain why bodily function jokes, crude humor, plus some clever makeup and two handfuls of performances by Eddie Murphy sucked $270 million out of the global economy in 1996 with The Nutty Professor.

Just be content -- or shake your head in distress -- knowing that Murphy and company have gone and made another one.

Fans of that earlier Eddiefest need not read any further. Murphy is back with the same mean-spirited comedy that put him back on top four years ago, so why would he fiddle with the formula?

With Nutty Professor II: The Klumps, he again plays soft-spoken, lonely-hearted, 400-pound genetics professor Sherman Klump, as well as four of the Klump clan, plus nasty, greedy Buddy Love and just a glimpse of a hyperactive Richard Simmons-like exercise instructor named Lance Perkins.

Murphy is very good at keeping these characters distinct and vivid, but the real star is five-time Oscar-winning makeup wizard Rick Baker. Frankly, the only reason I am sure Murphy is under all that latex is that the credits say so. With enough makeup, you can hide anyone these days, as Big Momma's House with Martin Lawrence proved.

The problem -- and the preview audience that was convulsed in laughter showed no evidence of minding -- is that director Peter Segal (Naked Gun 33-1/3) and his committee of writers from In Living Color, Saturday Night Live and American Pie have no idea what to do with all these characters beyond flatulence and bodily fluid jokes.

The Klumps, as you may recall, are robust eaters, so early on they head to a buffet to chow down with gusto and break wind with equal satisfaction.

If Sherman took a weight-reduction potion last time that turned him into lean, mean Buddy, this time he comes up with a youth serum. Having made sufficient fun of fat people, the sequel targets old folks, taking particular amusement in the effects of age and gravity on the human body.

Buddy is back and, for the sake of a few strained laughs, he occasionally thinks he is a dog. Muddying the plot -- which never manages to feel like a sustained story -- is Sherman's tampering with his DNA, which causes him to gradually lose brain cells. And the rest of the Klumps prattle on, led by randy Granny, grouchy Papa and upbeat Mama.

Typical of the sketch comedy writing is an odd detour for a parody of Star Wars, whose reason for existing seems to be the revelation that the force behind The Force is -- what else? -- flatulence.

Plugged into the Jada Pinkett role as Sherman's romantic interest is Janet Jackson, playing a professorial colleague who also doesn't miss many meals. She is the movie's lone straight man, which means looking teary-eyed as Sherman's brain turns to mush.

Listed again as one of the movie's executive producers is Jerry Lewis, an acknowledgement that all this began with his 1963 Jekyll and Hyde update. At the risk of siding with the French, that kinder, gentler, no-less-silly comic style seems a remnant of a golden age, compared with what Murphy hath wrought.

Of course, he is not alone, as the popularity of Scary Movie and Me, Myself & Irene demonstrate. One day, dumb and gross comedies will fall out of favor, but it doesn't look like it will happen anytime soon.

— Hap Erstein, Cox News Service