A pathetic attempt by Dan Akroyd to recapture the glory of his youth. This sequal contains absolutely nothing new and destroys all the classic moments of the first as it tires to remake them. If anyone else had made this movie it would be considered incompetent plagiarism, but seeing as it isn't plagiarism, it can only be labelled incompetent. The only redeeming factor is the soundtrack. Buy the disc, skip the movie.

Not so much a movie as an excuse for music. Interesting mostly if you want to see the musicians (especially in the "Louisiana Gator Boys" set where one can spend most of the song going "Hey! Isn't that...".)

The basic idea is that Elwood Blues is just out of prison, Jake Blues (like, of course, John Belushi) has died, and Sister Mary Stigmata asks Elwood to mentor a young boy and to help raise money for a children's hospital. Elwood decides to put the Blues Brothers Show Band back together despite everyone's reluctance, considering what happened the last time the band performed in The Blues Brothers. Car crashes and music ensue.

As a Chicago-area native, one reason the original Blues Brothers film is so special is its authenticity. The places they went, that they sped past, were all places I had seen or been to. Lower Wacker Drive, the Chez Paul, Wrigley Field, City Hall, the Honorable Richard J. Daley Plaza. It was "real", in a fictional sense. You could vividly imagine being being downtown on an average day as the big pursuit rolls by. "Yeah, Maxwell Street was really like that back then, with the street merchants and the sidewalk blues artists!" They used the same model Fords and Dodges, with the same paint schemes and lights as the Chicago and Illinois State Police. "I see cop cars like that every day!" Seeing a movie make really good use of locations is kind of like having a famous guest in your house.

Blues Brothers 2000 had none of this. Cheap Chevy Luminas as police cars. The wrong paint schemes and badges and crests on officers' uniforms. Unforgivable geographical mistakes. We barely ever see Chicago. (Chrissakes, it was filmed in Toronto!) A completely staged-for-the-purposes-of-plot "battle of the bands". If this were a real musical competition, why aren't there more than two bands? Where is the audience? We've made a lot of progress in the last twenty years, but there's still no way I'll believe that Mercedes would grant a dealership in Chicago to a black woman who ran a soul food restaurant and has an ex-con husband. Or to Aretha Franklin, for that matter. (That's an old-boy network that doesn't change so fast.) The only surreal character in The Blues Brothers was Sister Mary Stigmata. They were almost all surreal in Blues Brothers 2000. This movie didn't feel like it happened in your backyard. It felt like it happened in Wonderland. (Or Hollywood.)

Great cast. Great music. (Thank God there wasn't a catastrophic accident the day they filmed that "battle of the bands" scene, there were so many big names there, American music would have been maimed for decades.) But I only saw the movie once, in the theater. I refuse to see it again. I had to go home that day and watch the letterbox version of the original, and Ferris Bueller's Day Off to cleanse myself afterwards. I've never felt so disappointed.

Dan, this coulda been something. It had so much potential. But it was a bomb...

Another thing that stood out to me was _how_ cheap the movie looked. In the for example in "telephone-business" scene, the computers on the tables were fakes was easily seen, and the movie contiues along this line. Even if the budget was as low as it seems to have been, other films have done a better job at hiding this than this horror flick did. But lousy scriptwriting around the excellent music and a cheap, cheap budget got the movie off to a bad start.

Still, it could have been saved by nostalgia, but that was also not meant to happen. I won't go into the rehashing of scenes that worked in the first part, because others have already done so, but I felt like they were just going though the moves in this film:

And who the hell got the idea of including the kid? This was actually the most annoying thing about the movie. I wanted to see serious Blues Brothers action, not some comedic sidekick following the big guys lead (I liked John Goodman in this movie, really did) and stealing or filling scenes that could have been better employed. No wait, seeing the rest of the movie, they probably couldn't have been. Still, the kid annoyed the heck out of me. Sigh! If only this one had measured up the original ...

So, I agree with Puddleglum's assessment: Watch the original, listen to the soundtrack of BB 2000, but skip the flick!

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