It’s too loud and it’s too long, but that’s the point. The excess is the joke of this wild crowd-pleaser comedy. Here, writer/director John Landis and co-writer Dan Aykroyd perfect car crash slapstick. Landis throws cars up in the air like confetti, sends them barreling through an indoor mall and orchestrates cinema’s most insane pile-ups. World War II may have battered less metal than The Blues Brothers. Meanwhile, its story couldn’t be more simple. Black-suited blues devotees Dan Aykroyd and John Belushi get their old band back together (they broke up due to a combination of straight jobs, new wives and Belushi doing prison time) to raise money to save a church. That’s their excuse, at least. Along the way, they incur the wrath of police, neo-Nazis and a country band (lead by character-actor great Charles Napier) that got cheated out of a gig. Thunderous songs from the likes of Cab Calloway, Aretha Franklin, John Lee Hooker and Ray Charles provide respite from the insanity and ground this film in the music that inspired it. See this in a theater if you can. This is a film built for a big screen and a rowdy crowd.