I’d always known that this film was a huge cultural phenomenon and remember being puzzled by it as I couldn’t make head or tails of the videogame adaptation back in the day. Now that I’ve finally watched it I can understand why it’s a cult hit, as it features performances by such musical greats as Ray Charles, Aretha Franklin and James Brown. But overall, it’s just too ridiculous and too long of a film for me to like it very much.

Jake Blues is released from prison and picked up by his brother Elwood riding an old decommissioned police car that they dub the new Bluesmobile. They visit the orphanage where they were raised and learn that it is due to be closed down due to unpaid property taxes. They decide to raise the money themselves but the Mother Superior warns them that the money must come from legal means. Stumped as to how, they are inspired by a musical sermon in a church. They decide to reestablish their band the Blues Brothers and raise the money performing shows. But as their band members have since moved on to other things, they must first find them and convince them to join. Along the way, they face numerous obstacles such as the police, a mysterious woman who keeps trying to kill them with improbably large weapons, and even members of the so-called Illinois Nazi Party.

This is an insane, over the top movie and even the story of its making is quite remarkable. The Blues Brothers were a recurring act by John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd on the Saturday Night Live television show and became popular enough that a film was deemed bankable. But the script was written by Aykroyd himself who had no prior experience and so turned in a massive door stopper, crammed with seemingly anything he felt like including. This probably explains why the film is full of all kinds of random shit and how the brothers magically get handed solutions to their problems. It sounds like a recipe for a terrible trainwreck of a film and yet they managed to get enough of a budget to do whatever they want and John Landis is good enough of a director that the production quality is fundamentally sound. Between the truly insane number of car crashes, the incredible performances by all these musical legends and the sheer chutzpah of the plot that gleefully ignores logic and continuity, one must admit that it at least has some entertainment value.

But that’s still a long way from saying that it’s actually good. Watching the sheer number of car crashes in this is shocking but there’s no creativity or skill in mashing all those cars together so you don’t walk away impressed. The humor totally falls flat to me as it’s just too dumb. There is a kind of manic energy in this that reminded us of the Hong Kong movies of the 1980s. But this film is so long and drags scenes so much that it keeps losing momentum. The performances of the musical greats are of course fantastic but Belushi and Aykroyd are just embarrassing themselves on the stage. Apparently this helped revive the careers of the aging musicians at the time and that’s good, but it still feels silly that they have to cede the spotlight to these two.

Overall it’s good to get this out of the way so that I can say that I’ve watched this and there are parts that are kind of fun. But I can’t say that I like this much at all and it’s just too long for casual watching.