BLUES BROTHERS 2000
USA. 1998. Director - John Landis, Screenplay - Landis & Dan Aykroyd, Producers - Aykroyd, Landis & Leslie Belzberg, Photography - David Herrington, Music - Paul Shaffer, Visual Effects - Available Light Inc (Supervisor - John Van Vliet) & Optical Illusions, Special Effects Supervisor - Martin Malvoire, Ghost Rider Effects - Steve Johnson's XFX Inc, Production Design - Bill Brodie. Production Company - Universal. Dan Aykroyd (Elwood Blues), John Goodman (Mighty Mack McTeer), J. Evan Bonifant (Buster), Joe Morton (Commander Cabel Chamberlain), Nia Peeples (Lieutenant Elizondo), Kathleen Freeman (Mother Mary Stigmata), Erykah Badu (Queen Mousette), Steve Cropper (Steve `The Colonel' Cropper), Donald Dunn (Donald `Duck' Dunn), Murphy Dunne (Murph), Willie Hall (Willie `Too Big' Hall), Lou Marini (Blue Lou), Tom Malone (Tom `Bones' Malone), Alan Rubin (Mr Fabulous), Matt Murphy (Matt `Guitar' Murphy), Aretha Franklin (Mrs Murphy), James Brown (Reverend Cleophus James), B.B. King (Malvern Gasperon)
Plot: Elwood Blues is released from jail only to find his brother Jake has died in incarceration. Forming a new band along with a bartender, a juvenile delinquent, and a police chief whose personality is miraculously transformed, he sets out to reunite the remaining members of the backup band and play a new gig, a journey which turns into a massive cross-country chase as they are pursued by police, Russian mafia and right-wing militia groups.
The original `The Blues Brothers' (1980), although disliked by most critics at the time of its release, became a cult classic. Borderline fantasy at most, its enduring appeal lay somewhere between a great blues soundtrack, its anarchically surreal parody of a car chase movie and the laconically cool duo of Dan Aykroyd and John Belushi. This sequel, made fifteen years on, reunites one half of the title duo, Aykroyd, and original director John Landis, who has really failed to make anything that has the freshness of `The Blues Brothers' in the time in between. And despite replacement by three other characters, the absence of Belushi, who of course died of a heroin overdose in an LA motel room in 1982, hangs over the whole reunion exercise and leaves it with a kind of odour of bad judgement. Indeed not unlike the various reunion concerts performed in recent years by bands like Kiss, The Eagles and The Sex Pistols, the reunion smacks of a cynicism - of former creative forces sunken into a flabby and not too becoming middle-age whose get-together has been motivated less by a desire to explore new creative directions than it has of a desire to milk fans' nostalgia for more money.
And sadly `Blues Brothers 2000' is all of these things. It lacks any original ideas. The plot simply rehashes that of the first film - Blues Brothers(s) get out of jail and sets about reuniting the band, a quest which, as the film progresses, escalates into a surreally overblown chase with the police and various terrorist groups. The plot just flabbily plods from one incident to the next without, it seems, really anything except the musical numbers to hold it together. Indeed the end seems to peter out of plot altogether and just anti-climactically ends by trying to get as many famous blues legends as possible on stage for a massive jam session. This one even lacks the original's deadpan anarchism - there's one sequence with about fifty cop cars all piling into one another which goes on for about five minutes in a deadeningly excessive way and seems merely overblown. This film is a good deal more fantastic than its predecessor - miraculous personality changes in the midst of a gospel number; the Blues Brothers transformed into green-skinned zombies for a calypso number by a voodoo priestess; an appearance of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse above the stage during one performance. Why, one might ask. One might indeed ask but to do so might serve as much purpose as asking what the `2000' in the title refers to. And the only real answer appears to be the same sense of haphazardness with which the rest of the film appears to have been slung together.
Reviewed by Richard Scheib
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