I am more or less disagreeing with a group of critics who placed The Blues Brothers as number 53 among the 100 best comedies ever made. I am going to disagree with a lot of critics, and fans alike, as I don't find The Blues Brothers to be that fun of a comedy nor that well made of a movie. It's poorly paced and edited with short intermissions of brilliance sprinkled all over it. As a whole, it isn't a very well made movie.
The story, the little there is of it is, is simple enough. Joliet Jake (Belushi) is getting out of jail on parole, after serving 3-years of his 5-year sentence. Elwood (Aykroyd) is waiting for him at the gates, welcoming his brother among the free people and convincing him to tag along to see the Penguin (Kathleen Freeman), the head nun of the orphanage they grew up in. There they learn the orphanage has 5000$ tax debt it has to clear or it will be shut down. After a visit to a local church, Jake gets an epiphany and declares, that in order to save the orphanage they have to put the old band back up again.
That's the basic gist of the movie, not that the story really matters much on this run. The Blues Brothers are really more about Jake and Elwood cutting through Chicago, gathering up their crew, making up enemies and surviving from bizarre situations they tackle unfazed. It doesn't really matter if it is the Mysterious Woman (Fisher) trying to kill Jake or the Illinois Nazis at their heels, they blow through it all with a singular goal in mind.
Here's the thing about the movie: it is 133 minutes long. The length more or less can be contributed to the fact that it is a musical, filled with familiar names and faces of musicians like Ray Charles, Aretha Franklin and James Brown. A lot of the screentime is given to the performances and while they are good and well made, but the rest of the movie feels more aimless, which becomes a problem, as Landis really was more interested in making fun car chase scenes (the movie was a long time record holder in most cars destroyed in a movie) rather than elaborating on the many antagonists Jake and Elwood make on their way. You could argue that the movie has so tight focus that it forgets to focus on anything else, so it often feels it's impossible to care for the dregs the duo leaves in their wake.
When the movie isn't focusing on the musicians, it is almost solely focused on the Blue Brothers. This doesn't leave a lot of room in detailing the antagonists, who are presented in the movie almost like an afterthought or as padding, that would have been better left out. The cops and the Nazis already provide more than enough of a hindrance for Jake and Elwood, especially with the Mystery Woman. The addition of the angry country music group is just one layer too many, especially when they don't end up doing much in the end.
In many ways, The Blues Brothers is a bizarre and absurd movie. The way it presents its world is relatively slapstick in nature, but it also has an oddly sombre tone to all of it. It is filled with directional choices, that don't really mesh in with comedy, like the long opening scene showing how Jake is finally released from prison, almost completely devoid of humour. Even the jokes that are in the scene are presented in a serious tone, like in a deliberate attempt of underlying that they are not jokes but things that just happen. It often feels like there are several movies there mixed into a single movie but those different movies don't really mesh up well.
I don't know, maybe it all can be chalked on that the moviemakers didn't really have a concrete idea of what they were doing. It was originally sold without a script to a studio thanks to the emerging star of John Belushi after the smash-hit comedy Animal House, also directed by Landis. Aykroyd and Belushi wanted to make a movie of their Saturday Night Live characters but didn't have a script before Aykroyd, who hadn't ever written a script before penned out a tome that was later pieced into a script by Landis.
After the shoots were done, 10 million over the budget, the first cut was 2 and a half hours long. This was shortened by 20-minutes, but considering the scenes left in the movie, I don't know if that additional 20-minutes would do any favours for the shambling structure of the musical.
Yeah, The Blues Brothers is a cult classic alright. The kind of movie that has its diehard fans who know every detail of it by heart. And I do see why, as it is a peculiar movie, almost one of a kind. But like many other cult classics, it's not necessarily a good movie either, it just has elements in it that people love to death despite the flaws it has.
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