The Blues Brothers

4.50
    The Blues Brothers
    1980

    Synopsis

    Jake Blues, just released from prison, puts his old band back together to save the Catholic home where he and his brother Elwood were raised.

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    Cast

    • Dan AykroydElwood Blues
    • John Belushi'Joliet' Jake Blues
    • James BrownCleophus James
    • Cab CallowayCurtis
    • Ray CharlesRay
    • Aretha FranklinMrs. Murphy
    • Steve CropperSteve 'The Colonel' Cropper
    • Donald 'Duck' DunnDonald 'Duck' Dunn
    • Murphy DunneMurphy 'Murph' Dunne
    • Willie HallWillie 'Too Big' Hall

    Recommendations

    • 100

      The Telegraph

      The film also has stunning car chases, choreographed like the dancing in a musical, as the Blues Brothers are pursued throughout Chicago, at one point even tearing through a shopping mall, in their 'Bluesmobile', a retired 1974 Mount Prospect, Illinois Dodge Monaco patrol car.
    • 80

      The Guardian

      The stunts are still awe-inspiring, and there's plenty of laughs. They really were thinking big.
    • 75

      Chicago Sun-Times

      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.
    • 60

      Time Out London

      That Dan Aykroyd and John Belushi adore this music is not in question – it’s lovingly chosen and brilliantly performed – but the film sometimes feels like a work of cultural tourism, particularly in scenes set in a gospel church and a Chicago street market. These lively musical sequences also sit awkwardly with director John Landis’s bizarre predilection for wholesale destruction: sure, smashing up cop cars can be fun, but Landis takes things to a tiresome extreme.
    • 50

      Variety

      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.
    • 50

      TV Guide Magazine

      THE BLUES BROTHERS is a monument to waste, noise and misplaced cool, but it does have its engagingly nutty moments.
    • 40

      The New York Times

      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.
    • 40

      Chicago Reader

      John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd star as two white boys who love nuns, blacks, and the blues. But for all of the dramatic focus on poverty, the subject of John Landis's mise-en-scene is money—making it, spending it, blowing it away. The humor is predicated on underplaying in overscaled situations, which is sporadically funny in a Keaton-esque way but soon sputters out through sheer, uninspired repetition.

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