The Johnny Angel review of:
Blues Brothers 2000
I finally got around to watching The Blues Brothers 2000. I avoided it when it was in the theater, because I saw the previews, and even the previews were bad. The most obvious sign that the movie would be bad, of course, was the appearance of the child, decked out in the black suit, hat and shades. Adding a child to the mix is always a desperate act for a television show in decline, and it looks desperate.
Not being an enthusiast of bad cinema, it may be that I have an inflated idea of just how abysmal this movie really was. It’s certainly the worst movie that I’ve ever sat all the way through. And it might even be no worse than the shabby side of mediocre to someone who wasn’t a fan of the 1980 Blues Brothers.
But as a movie in general, and as a sequel especially, this movie is a failure by any rubric, except as a showcase for music. More on the music later.
It’s a baffling example of how the creative minds behind a film can so terribly misunderstand what made it wonderful to begin with. Or perhaps it’s an example of how the particular genius of a film, even if it is not a fluke, can be irreproducible. Something similar happened with Aykroyd’s other impressive contribution to cinema, Ghostbusters. The sequel fell far short of the inspiration behind the original. However, I don’t mean to suggest in any way that Blues Brothers 2000 is as good as Ghostbusters 2.
The sequel is splattered with parallels to the original, some very subtle, like the resemblance of the mossy path to Queen Mousette’s house to the tunnel outside The Palace Hotel Ballroom. Others blatant, like the repeat of Matt “Guitar” Murphy’s chastisement by his wife, played by Aretha Franklin. If they couldn’t go for new material, they really should have at least tried for the same delivery.
The Blues Brothers had a strong premise which held together a plot. “We’re on a mission from God.” The invisible hand of God is present throughout the film, making the preposterous seem plausible.
The Blues Brothers 2000 has a thin premise, which gets dropped almost as soon as it’s brought up. I’m only now remembering what it was supposed to be – Elwood was supposed to win a band contest in order to fund a children’s hospital. The movie itself doesn’t take this premise very seriously. The invisible hand of God is present, only not nearly so invisible this time. It’s now the heavy hand of God, and without nearly so clear a purpose, making the preposterous seem stupid.
A great deal of the humor of The Blues Brothers was that it never cracked a smile at its own jokes. But for the new film, they all but added a laugh track. The sequel is loaded with references to the original, often repeating the very same gags, as if to illustrate that jokes that are hilarious when told with a straight face can be pathetic when told with a shit-eating grin.
One is almost tempted to suppose that this was meant to be more of a family picture. That’s the charitable interpretation, that they were trying for banality. Cigarettes were part of the idiom of the old Blues Brothers. But in this film, Elwood tells the kid (they brought in a kid, always a sign of desperation) not to smoke. Even Donald `Duck’ Dunn’s pipe, which was a standard part of his image, is missing. Only the bad guys in this film smoke, and they’re absolute fiends about it.
You’d almost think they were trying to make a family film, and they did make a big deal out of the concept of `family,’ in the promotions, but they didn’t mention in the previews that there would be long sequences of erotic dancing. But this is not to say that these erotic scenes were edgy at all. Even g-strings didn’t manage to rescue this film from banality.
The Blues Brothers immersed the viewer in the grimy streets of Chicago. But, the urbanity has been scrubbed off of the sequel. There are some token city sequences, mostly aerial shots, but the characters of the film seem to exist apart from it all. And in fact, they were – most of the scenes that were set in Chicago were shot in Vancouver. Every scene in this film was clean and sanitary, and they didn’t even try for the kind grittiness achieved by the itinerant hotel sequence in the original. Even the alleys in this film are clean.
Aykroyd created the characters Jake and Elwood Blues, and wrote a back story for them. In The Blues Brothers, the audience gets a coherent sense of who these people are. But by the time he worked on The Blues Brothers 2000, Aykroyd seems to have lost his vision of Elwood Blues. It’s not just that the character has changed. We would be suprised if he hadn’t. It’s that the character has no consistent personality at all anymore. As the movie starts, we see him simple-mindedly waiting for his brother as though he were a dog waiting for its master. The scene is meant to be touching, but its more like degrading. Later, he seems to be himself again for a little while, but he’s clearly been cast in the role of the fish out of water – a formula which Aykroyd has had some success with in the past. At some points, he comes across with the alieness of Beldar Conehead – only this time the alien comes not from France, but from Calumet City. But a more accurate parallel would be to Aykroyd’s portrayal of Joe Friday as a meta-story about man taken out of his genre, where the world worked according to the character’s logic, and plopped down into a zany world he’s not equipped to deal with. Elwood was a cool and laconic, if slow witted, pathological reprobate in his own world, but he can’t seem to figure out who he is in this new world, and goes through a roller-coaster of extremes, from goofy and stupid to smart and verbose. The end result is that he has no personality at all anymore.
As for the music, obviously it was good. I still object to the way this film, like the previous one, conflates Blues' with Soul’ and even R&B'. These don't exactly clash, but they're importantly different, and what the Blues Brothers play is mostly Soul. If we are to take the dialogue at its word and actually suppose that Elwood sees it as his mission to bring The Blues’ to the next generation, we might as well start by not using a single term to encapsulate a nuanced array of musical styles and influences.
It was marvelous to see Eddie Floyd and Wilson Pickett get some recognition, since they are among the artists whose work haunted the previous film, but who didn’t get mentioned. They did a duet on 634-5789 that was reminiscent of Sam and Dave, who were heard in the background of The Blues Brothers.
But the segues into the musical numbers were cornier, more forced, and less plot driven than in the earlier, better film.
The movie is a failure as a comedy, as a family movie, as sentimental fluff, and it tries its damnedest to fail as a jukebox movie. As a sequel to a cult classic, it’s a tragedy, a humiliation for everyone involved. Watching it is aesthetic self-flagellation.
My recomendation: Don’t go see it. Don’t acknowledge that it exists.