The Blues Brothers sequel that lost Jake and still flopped
Eighteen years after the original, John Landis and Dan Aykroyd reunited for a second Blues Brothers movie, this time with John Goodman riding alongside Elwood. It cost $30 million, earned $32 million, and packed a voodoo queen, rat transformations and a supergroup of blues legends into its plot.
Universal released Blues Brothers 2000 on February 6, 1998, as a follow-up to the 1980 hit. Landis directed and co-wrote the script with Aykroyd, and both also produced. Critics were split, and the box-office return barely covered the budget, so the film is usually counted as a bomb. Its selling point was music: a long line of musicians turn up in cameos.
The story opens with Elwood walking out of prison after an eighteen-year sentence for the chaos of the first film, only to learn that his brother Jake has died. Mother Mary Stigmata, now working in a hospital because the orphanage shut down, tells him his mentor Curtis is also dead but left behind a son, Cabel Chamberlain, who happens to command a unit of the Illinois State Police. She also nudges Elwood towards mentoring a young orphan named Buster.
Cabel wants nothing to do with a man with Elwood's record, but Buster lifts his wallet on the way out, which pays for a new Bluesmobile. Elwood and Buster then round up the old band from their day jobs. Drummer Willie Hall signs on after the Russian mafia burns down his strip club, guitarist Matt Murphy leaves the Mercedes-Benz dealership he runs with his wife, and keyboard player Murphy Dunne gets his call-centre boss's permission to go.
The road trip gets stranger. The band is booked by mistake as a bluegrass act and plays anyway, and a sermon from Reverend Cleophus James converts Cabel from pursuer to bandmate. Queen Mousette, said to be a 130-year-old voodoo witch, forces them to play Caribbean music, freezes three of them as statues, then releases them for a battle of the bands. They lose to the Louisiana Gator Boys, the mobsters and militiamen chasing them are turned into rats, and Elwood slips away with Buster as the police close in.
Source: Blues Brothers 2000
