Blues Brothers 2000 (1998)

Blues Brothers 2000 arrives eighteen years after the original, with Elwood out of prison, Jake dead, and a newly discovered half-brother wearing an Illinois State Police uniform who must be talked into picking up a guitar. John Landis and Dan Aykroyd wrote the thing, the studio sanded it down to a PG rating, and what survives is a road movie stitched between musical numbers. The plot is scaffolding. The band is the building, and the building is loud.

An honest cultural audit of this picture begins and ends with the music. The ensemble is dense with Black blues titans: B.B. King, James Brown, Wilson Pickett, Aretha Franklin. Joe Morton commands a state police post. This is the genre paying its own respects, not a casting initiative with a memo attached, and the film never asks us to notice. Nia Peeples wears a lieutenant's badge, Erykah Badu's Queen Mousette runs a supernatural empire, yet neither part carries an argument about anything. Race is present the way weather is present. Nobody turns to the camera to explain it. The blues is the point, and the blues has always been everybody's business.

The film has no interest in instructing us. It wants a record-breaking car pile-up, a voodoo queen, and eighteen musical numbers, and it gets all of them, plus a Mercedes-Benz dealership and a burning strip club that are treated as scenery instead of sin. There is no climate anxiety here, no sermon about bodies or brains, no revision of the historical record. Russian mobsters become rats. The militia boat explodes. The credits roll. A viewer could call this a failure of ambition, and many did, at length, in 1998. It is closer to a triumph of the jukebox. As a document, it preserves a generation of musicians on film. As a movie, it is a long, cheerful, mildly exhausting errand. Modern cinema prefers to explain itself. This one never does, and there is a small, dusty relief in that.