The Blues Brothers

An exceptional comedy...Car wrecks and blues-related music galore in the best movie ever made in Chicago. [11 July 1980, p.3-8]

And then, of course, there was the music, better music than any film had had for many years.

What's a little startling about this movie is that all of this works. The Blues Brothers cost untold millions of dollars and kept threatening to grow completely out of control. But director John Landis (of “Animal House”) has somehow pulled it together, with a good deal of help from the strongly defined personalities of the title characters. Belushi and Aykroyd come over as hard-boiled city guys, total cynics with a world-view of sublime simplicity, and that all fits perfectly with the movie's other parts. There's even room, in the midst of the carnage and mayhem, for a surprising amount of grace, humor, and whimsy.

THE BLUES BROTHERS is a monument to waste, noise and misplaced cool, but it does have its engagingly nutty moments.

If Universal had made it 35 years earlier, The Blues Brothers might have been called Abbott & Costello in Soul Town. Level of inspiration is about the same now as then, the humor as basic, the enjoyment as fleeting. But at $30 million, this is a whole new ball-game.

There are parts of The Blues Brothers that would have played infinitely better with a knock-about feeling, a sloppiness like that of "Animal House." As it is, the movie is airless. The stakes needn't have been so suffocatingly high.

Landis seems no surer of his visual style than he does of his movie's tone, so he tries everything: shots angled from a dog's-or a god's-eye view, eerily lighted special effects, more dancers, more extras, more noise, more cars and car crashes. Alas, more is less, and The Blues Brothers ends up totaling itself.

I guess Trumpists don't like it. That's why I showed it to my children as soon as they were three. It should be compulsory in elementary schools around the world, and then repeated every school year to teach the three most important things in life: 1. Na zis and racists are sh--, 2. The Band (and good music) is always the answer, and 3. That weird guy stealing wiper blades at the gas station might be on a mission from God. - T.

The more time passes since this movie was made, the more you realise what an amazing tribute this is to an entire era and to the absolute legends who were still around in 1980. Unmissable.

"We're on a mission from god." Yeah, they sure were. This movie is perfect.

"We're on a mission from God" Has some scattered moments of brilliance, mostly in its musical sections. My guess is for most people is, and definitely for me, that if were asked how many car chase scenes are in this movie your guess would be short be about 7+ cause it feels like half the movie is car chases.

Alright, well, here this goes. No, I didn't really like "The Blues Brothers." And that's okay. I don't have to like every movie widely regarded as a classic of the American cinematic arts. In fact, I can plainly see why this one is so sweepingly adored. The infectious dance numbers, the joy-inducing cameos, the bombastic set pieces. It's all fairly enjoyable and - in fact - I enjoyed a lot of it. It's just that, even though there's a general throughline here, there's also this episodic nature to the majority of the second act that didn't really dazzle me in any way. Jake and Elwood have to go to X place and get X person to do X, they do it, and then have to go to X place and get X person to do X as well. It's all too piecemeal for my tastes. But, again, there's still a lot here to be enjoyed and "enjoy" I did (for the most part).