1998's Blues Brothers 2000 Was the Off-Brand Follow-Up We Neither Needed Nor Wanted

I'm not sure this motion picture really needed to be made.

Welcome, friends, to the latest entry in my ongoing series about Saturday Night Live movies. I initially planned to do this in chronological order but then I realized I could write about these movies in whatever goddamn order I want and there’s nothing Mr. Sleepy Joe “Let’s Go Brandon” Biden can do about it. 

I’ve been feeling bummed about the cancellation of the second Blues Brothers Convention in Old Joliet Prison. What passes for the Blues Brothers these days shut it down due to the Actors and Writer Strikes. So I am left with a powerful hunger for late-period Blues Brothers content that can only be filled by re-watching 1998’s disastrous Blues Brothers 2000. 

Because of my extraordinary fondness for the first film I’ve seen Blues Brothers 2000 several times already AND got to see a replica of the movie’s main car. That was exciting. I was so amped up that I had trouble sleeping that night. 

I first reviewed Blues Brothers 2000 during it during its theatrical run TWENTY-FIVE YEARS AGO! A quarter century, even! That’s seven more years than the deadly eighteen year gap separating 1980’s The Blues Brothers and 1998’s Blues Brothers 2000. 

I say deadly because the main reason Blues Brothers 2000 does not work, and there are many, many reasons, is because the main guy is dead. 

A Blues Brothers sequel should have died with John Belushi in 1982. The Blues Brothers was John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd. It was their friendship. It was their bond. It was their shared love of performing in front of ecstatic live audiences as well as larger but more distant television and movie crowds. 

One of these movies is better than the other.

There was something so magical and almost unexplainable about this twosome, and only this twosome, that it made two funnymen performing blues standards in suits, sunglasses and hats into a pop culture phenomena and the raw clay for one of the most timeless and enduring film comedies of the last half century. 

The Blues Brothers was the product of a time and place and very specific cultural moment. More importantly it was a product of a creative partnership that helped establish Saturday Night Live’s early voice. 

Oh sure you could always make a Blues Brothers movie without John Belushi but why would you? What’s the point? How could it not be fatally flawed and hollow where its fiery, combustible comic engine should be? 

The answer is that people really dug the Blues Brothers and in the mid to late 1990s Dan Aykroyd’s career as a bankable leading man, with the notable exception of his boldly off-brand vocal take on Yogi Bear in the 3-D motion picture of the same name, was just about over. Some say he never recovered from Nothing But Trouble. I say these people are fools and should be be burned alive and buried in an unmarked grave. 

So Aykroyd did what veteran performers in his position often do. He retreated into the comforting cocoon of the past. If the people didn’t want the new stuff then he’d give them the classic material but with an exhausted middle-age twist. 

Blues Brothers 2000 at least has the decency to immediately address the fatal shortcoming keeping it from being successful on any level. We open with Aykroyd’s Elwood Blues getting out of prison after 18 long years in the hole and learning that John Belushi’s “Joliet” Jake Blues is dead. 

Oh, and Elwood’s beloved father figure Curtis (Cab Calloway) is dead as well. In the original cut, a despondent Elwood reportedly learns that the six or or seven other people he loved dearly had also died horrible, tragic deaths while he was in prison as well but focus groups considered it too much of a downer. 

As I’m sure I wrote in either my original review or a 2016 My World of Flops entry, Blues Brothers 2000 tells you why it should not exist (the man who should be starring in it died sixteen years earlier) and then proceeds to exist anyway. 

Another of Blues Brothers 2000’s fatal flaws is that Elwood Blues was a sidekick. His role in the band was to play harmonica, contribute the odd vocal and make the lead singer look good. 

Belushi was the frontman. He was the leading man. His absence leaves a hole that the film can never fill and is all the more glaring due to the film’s sweaty desperation in trying and failing to replace someone irreplaceable. 

A grief-stricken yet blues-crazed Elwood then goes to visit Sister Mary Stigmata (Kathleen Freeman), the fierce yet godly disciplinarian who kept Jake and Elwood in line through humorous physical assaults. 

If you loved it when the enraged nun hit Elwood and Jake whenever they swore, which caused them to swear further, in the original then you might be able to muster a meek chuckle when the dynamic is repeated here, but with a PG-13 level profanity and also not funny. 

This establishes a template the movie seldom deviates from. Like many sub-par, egregiously unnecessary sequels, Blues Brothers 2000 is actually more of a remake of its predecessor than a proper follow up. 

Aykroyd and director John Landis’ script hits all the same beats as the 1980 classic but without the freshness of the original. 

Throughout Blues Brothers 2000 I found myself thinking, “Didn’t they do this in the last movie?” The answer was almost always yes. If they aren’t directly lifting a gag or a scene then they’re offering up a very close variation. 

In The Blues Brothers, for example, the band performs at a rowdy country venue and attempt to save face by performing “Rawhide.” In Blues Brothers 2000, however, the band is booked at a rowdy bluegrass gig and attempt to save face by performing “(Ghost) Riders in the Sky: A Cowboy Legend."

Totally different. 

In an act of terrible judgment Sister Mary Stigmata has Elwood, a man who just spent eighteen hard years in the Big House for committing a variety of offenses costing millions of dollars, to act as a mentor/father figure Buster "Scribbles" Blues (J. Evan Bonifant). 

I’m not sure what Sister Mary thought Elwood could teach the impressionable youngster other than ways to commit crimes. Buster is at first a real wisenheimer but the film loses interest in him quickly and relegates him to singing, dancing, playing harmonica and generally being adorable in the background. 

Blues Brothers 2000 can’t devote too much screen time to Buster because it needs to give Elwood two more sidekicks. Aykroyd and Landis labor under the delusion that the way to make up for a fatal lack of a leading man/frontman to carry a movie and band is by giving the sidekick sidekicks of his own.

These include John Goodman as “Mighty Mack”, a bartender at a strip club who wows Elwood with his slightly above average singing and agreeable personality. 

I yield to no one in my love of John Goodman, who is currently doing some of the best work of his career as a complicated patriarch in The Righteous Gemstones. The man is a national treasure. I will weep when he passes. 

I had no idea what Goodman was doing here beyond picking up a paycheck for what was hopefully a very fun shoot. At the very least no one died. You can’t say that about all of Landis’ films. 

The film’s conception of “Mighty Mack” is essentially “lovable teddy bear of a man who loves to sing.” Goodman is certainly likable enough but he never makes you forget John Belushi and often makes you think about that man and how essential he was to the success of The Blues Brothers. 

To further make up for John Belushi being too dead to reprise his role as “Joliet” Jake Blues the movie has radically expanded the roles of the legendary musicians who make up the Blues Brothers Band. 

The Blues Brothers touring and recording band was made up of some of the greatest musicians in the world. Nobody, but nobody, was better at their instrument than they were. 

When you’re that good at playing an instrument and everybody and their mother knows it, you are generally rewarded by the universe by not having to do anything other than what you were put on earth to do. 

Blues Brothers 2000 painfully forces a lot of dialogue and jokes onto musicians who couldn’t look or sound more stilted or out of place. Aykroyd and Landis were not doing these veteran musicians any favors by having them unsuccessfully attempt comedy. In fact, he was doing them a terrible disservice. 

Incidentally Aykroyd’s massive original screenplay for The Blues Brothers delved deep into the lives and backstories of the band but Landis cut all that out in order to get the show on the road as quickly as possible. 

Elwood and his two sidekicks travel the country getting the band back together and gyrating awkwardly and whitely. 

The final unnecessary addition to the newfangled Blues Brothers is Cabel Chamberlain (Joe Morton), Curtis’ illegitimate son and a straight arrow who chose a life in law enforcement over committing crimes. 

Morton is a great actor but he’s not a natural comedian and having his character have the same life-changing epiphany as Jake Blues in a nearly identical way again only calls attention to what the film doesn’t have. 

The Blues Brothers and their band eventually end up at a battle of the bands overseen by Erykah Badu as Queen Moussette. 

Badu is stunning. Her presence is regal. She is captivating. Also she does not seem to have aged a day in the last quarter century. Unfortunately she’s like every other dynamic performer in the cast: defeated by a nothing role and the fact that she’s in Blues Brothers 2000 and not The Blues Brothers. 

This final battle of the band pits the Blues Brothers against The Louisiana Gator Boys, a group that is as skilled at music as they are hopeless at delivering “funny” dialogue. 

EVERYONE is in the Louisiana Gator Boys, including Jeff “Skunk” Baxter and every white man who ever played blues guitar. Is it fun seeing all those heavyweights play together? Not really. It just feels busy, slick and empty. 

Blues Brothers 2000 is unfortunately the cinematic equivalent of the Blues Brothers Convention. It’s an ersatz, off-brand experience that only makes you think about John Belushi. 

It’s too late to cancel the production of Blues Brothers 2000 but I should probably stop re-watching it at some point. Even an obsessive like me has to know his limits.