‘The Blues Brothers 2000’ or — The Best Advert for Compulsory Cocaine Use in The Film Industry?
I distinctly remember when ‘The Blues Brothers 2000’ (1998) came out and the critical kicking it got, so I naturally avoided it. However, last night I got curious and decided to watch it. After all, how bad could it actually b… Sweet Jesus McFuck!!
‘The Blues Brothers 2000’ starts by dedicating the film to the deceased stars of the original which is ironic (and the only funny thing about the movie) as it appears from watching this film that it’s the surviving members — John Landis and Dan Aykroyd — who were the ones who actually died, developed rigor mortis and decomposed but decided to carry on and make the movie anyway. The result? This film is a desecrated corpse.
I knew ‘The Blues Brothers 2000’ had a kid in it, a kid who does that folding his arms thing that people in Hollywood think regular people think is funny and cute because the little guy’s got ‘tude, man (we don’t and never have), even though no intelligent adult crosses their arms in that manner unless they’re an asshole. Amazingly, the kid is not this film’s biggest problem; he’s just a peripheral one.
The big problem, and one I was not expecting, is that ‘The Blues Brothers 2000’ is an almost carbon-copy rehash of the original sans charm, wit, energy, action, humour, verve and destruction. If the first movie was the result of excessive cocaine use then not only should its consumption be tolerated whenever Landis and Aykroyd work but also absolutely mandatory if this sequel is what happens when they’re straight.
Landis can have a directing problem anyway. It’s not that he’s a bad director, far from it, but he’s also not terribly visually exciting, tending to keep the camera static and with a rather pedestrian eye for composition. If the comedic energy is there (as it is in his best films) none of this matters but when it isn’t his work can feel thuddeningly flat. ‘The Blues Brothers 2000’ has all the visual depth of a pancake.
Likewise Aykroyd, batshit crazy anti-intellectual and vodka enthusiast, hasn’t been funny in a loooong time so the writing here… but again, we come back to the point that this is nothing more than a rehash so the film doesn’t feel written so much as refitted. Almost every single beat from the original — leaving prison, visiting the Penguin, going on a mission from God, putting the band back together, a moment of epiphany during a church service, playing a gig somewhere dangerous, pissing off right-wing groups, etc — are all here but stripped of any charm or energy, rendering the entire experience legitimately pathetic.
The worst example is the climatic police car pile-up. In the original it was a glorious celebration of excess, mayhem and destruction. Here, in an attempt to repeat and outdo that sequence, ‘The Blues Brothers 2000’ simply dumps more vehicles onto this cinematic bonfire simply so the film can declare “We crashed more cars!” But that’s all they’ve done — crashed more cars. So it feels like a technical exercise as car after car crashes on top of one another and this goes on and on and on for WAY too long. This is not the comedy of repetition; it is simply repetition.
Surely the music must be good, though? Well, that depends. Quite frankly I could happily never hear Aretha Franklin sing ‘R.E.S.P.E.C.T.’ ever again after this and by the time the final blues gig occurs what little tolerance I have for blues music, which isn’t much as it is, had evaporated away, almost along with my love of cinema itself.
‘The Blues Brothers 2000’ is fucking awful, and I mean really bad. It’s a slog (it is 24 minutes shorter than the original but feels three times longer), is anger-inducingly unfunny and keeps violently buggering the ghost of the original to the extent that the film feels like an act of revenge or vengeance rather than one of love or respect.
This is a horrible film to sit through on every single level and every single second of it is a reminder than there’s a much better film out there you could be watching instead. Watch that instead.
