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The Blues Brothers plan to raise the money by holding a big charity concert. This means getting the band back together again, a premise that allows the introduction of celebrity musicians as James Brown, Aretha Franklin, Ray Charles, Cab Calloway, Chaka Khan, and John Lee Hooker. Non-musician celebrity cameos include Steven Spielberg, Frank Oz, John Candy, Pee-Wee Herman, Twiggy, and director John Landis.
Since The Blues Brothers regularly break the law and invoke chaos at all times, they rapidly accumulate enemies, such as a deranged Carrie Fisher, Nazi wannabe Henry Gibson, an entire Country & Western outfit known as The Good Ole Boys, as well as a phalanx of swat teams and state police. The Blues Brothers probably holds the record for mall destruction and wrecked cop cars. Don't try this at home.
How others will see it. The movie generally got bad reviews, and received no consequential award nominations. It cost a ton of money to make, but became a blockbuster. The Blues Brothers also sold a ton of records at the time. A sequel was made 20 years later, long after John Belushi's death.
For those immersed in the culture of "Saturday Night Live" and/or 1960s soul music, The Blues Brothers is a wonderful exercise in nostalgia. It is also a fine movie if, for some reason, you enjoy seeing cars smash into each other. The humor in such situations comes from the deadpan expressions of Jake and Elwood despite their dire predicaments. Elwood, for example, remarks "The new Oldsmobiles are in early this year," as they crash through a dealership, hotly pursued by several police cars.
Younger audiences favor the movie for its hipness and madness, even though they are likely to miss the cultural references. For example, they won't recognize the legendary rhythm and blues musicians. Per the user ratings at imdb.com, women over 45 grade the movie lowest, perhaps objecting to the deliberately preposterous plot and characters.
How I felt about it. I was a teenager when The Blues Brothers came out, and "Saturday Night Live" was nearly mandatory viewing for teens at the time. Seeing the film again in 2009, some three decades after it was made, was mildly depressing for me, because of the first five actors listed (Belushi, Aykroyd, James Brown, Cab Calloway, Ray Charles), four are no longer with us.
It is still fun watching The Blues Brothers remain in character throughout. They will wear their dark clothes, hats, and sunglasses whenever possible, even in a sauna. They won't crack a smile, but they will sabotage an elevator, or barricade a door with stacked furniture. And they must be on a mission from God after all, or else all those cop cars wouldn't collide with each other. God is apparently either a scrapyard operator or an agent for stuntmen.