The movie John Goodman knew was doomed from the start: “Nobody wanted to make it”
There’s more than a whiff of irony about John Goodman, an actor who’s always been his own harshest critic, admitting that a movie he thoroughly enjoyed making was also one he knew was doomed to fail.
As anyone would expect from someone with such a prolific career across film, television, and animation, Goodman’s track record is hardly flawless. However, for all the bad movies and forgettable TV shows he’s appeared in, it would take a brave soul to claim he’s the problem.
After all, he earned his reputation as one of the industry’s most dependable and in-demand character actors by being very good at his job, and even when he’s trapped in something shoddy like Transformers sequels, Death Sentence, Evan Almighty, or Masked and Anonymous, it’s not his fault they suck.
Goodman wasn’t the only one who thought the film was on a hiding to nothing, either, because how many people were really demanding a sequel to The Blues Brothers almost two decades after John Belushi’s death? He was instrumental to the opener’s success, thanks to his firebrand charisma and chemistry with Dan Aykroyd, and there was little chance lightning would strike twice without him.
To try and offset the late Saturday Night Live legend’s absence, Aykroyd did the sensible thing and sought to cast his brother, Jim, as Zee Blues. Unfortunately, scheduling conflicts meant he couldn’t commit, leaving Goodman to shoulder the burden of the second lead as Mack McTeer.
John Landis’ original is one of the best movies to emerge from an SNL sketch and one of the most entertaining musical capers ever made, meaning the odds were stacked against Blues Brothers 2000 from the beginning. Despite several standout songs, which were the bare minimum, it fell flat at the box office and was greeted tepidly by critics and audiences alike.
“Danny and I did that movie for nothing just to help get it made,” Goodman told AV Club, hinting that studio politics effectively tied at least one of Aykroyd’s hands behind his back. “Nobody wanted to make it, and the studios had their own idea of how to do it, and Danny’s a very agreeable guy.”
It sounds as though the longtime Ghostbuster bent the knee to the boardroom to ensure Blues Brothers 2000 happened, regardless of how much it impacted his original intentions: “He just went along with them to get the movie made,” Goodman acknowledged, indicating that the picture might not have been so forgettable had its star, producer, and co-writer shown a little more backbone.
It’s not offensively bad, but it’s a massive downgrade from its illustrious predecessor. It hits many of the same beats and tries to replicate the magic of The Blues Brothers through a litany of cameos and showstopping song-and-dance numbers, but when watching 2000, viewers can’t shake the feeling that everyone involved is trying far too hard to stuff the lightning back into the bottle.
On the plus side, Goodman had fun, even if he had an inkling from the start that the sequel was pre-ordained to fail when it took so many compromises just to get it across the finish line.
