1980 - THE BLUES BROTHERS, would be a pretty entertaining film if The Blues Brothers weren't in it

Dan Aykroyd and John Belushi were considered the pinnacle of hip in cultural comedy in the 1970's and 80's.  Watching their mediocre performances in The Blues Brothers leaves me scratching my head as to what they were all about 20 years later.

Aykroyd took their two Saturday Night Live characters Jake and Elwood Blues and along with the director John Landis developed them into a large scale musical/comedy film.  Aykroyd's idea of having two white guys dressed in black suits and wearing sunglasses is supposed to be the ultimate in hipster cool.  Even so Landis must have known that Belushi and Aykroyd doing this extended SNL sketch wouldn't hold up for a two hour film so he loaded the film with large scale car chases and destruction sight gags to keep the audience interested. 

The guest stars in the musical numbers were famous black performers like Aretha Franklin, Ray Charles, Cab Calloway and James Brown.  Unfortunately Landis shoots them in such a pedestrian manner it doesn't really spotlight their skills as performers.

Then there are the two stars of The Blues Brothers, John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd.  I would never argue that Belushi and Aykroyd couldn't be funny, but something about their movies always rang a little hollow.  Once Belushi stumbled onto his Blutto character from Animal House, he repeated that character constantly until it got completely tiresome.  Belushi tried to move away from the Blutto character in a couple of films.  However his actual performing skills outside of sketch comedy seemed pretty limited.  Dan Aykroyd probably had more of a commitment to this project and an acting career in general but he's not really much better.

The real problem with the stars of The Blues Brothers is that they can't sing or dance very well.  John Landis must have been aware of this.  He doesn't let them perform with any of the musical guest stars and he doesn't feature very much of their dancing.  What worked as a short SNL sketch looks amateurish in a feature film.

Landis loads his film up with his usual stunt casting.  Twiggy shows up for a bit.  Frank Oz, the voice of Yoda, is in the film.  Carrie Fisher has a completely useless role as a woman trying to kill The Blues Brothers with a rocket launcher and even Steven Spielberg gets dragged into this.

You can however take pity on Landis since he had to deal with Belushi's very serious drug problems, something he refers to in the "making of" feature on the DVD. 

So what is the reason to watch The Blues Brothers?  It's the car chases.  This is probably one of the few films where car chases were filmed on a massive scale.  Demolishing a real shopping mall with real cars and the amazing amount of cars crashed on an Illinois freeway and in Chicago is something to see.

Running time, 133 minutes, written by Dan Aykroyd and John Landis.