"Wired" (1989)

I remember hearing about this one when it came out at the tail-end of the summer of 1989. Not only did it get major bollocking in the reviews (and even that's being polite about it), but also words from people like Dan Aykroyd, telling everyone not to touch it with a ten-foot pole. Indeed, I never saw it on cable, although I did see it sitting on shelves at video-rental places for a while, under a thick layer of dust. It really must be that bad then, eh?

Flash forward into the 2000's, and I'm a fan of The Shield. I would tape episodes being broadcast on Mondays at 1 AM on the CW channel, and then couldn't wait to get home from work to watch it and see what happened in this week's episode. As I began to get into the show, I wondered about main star Michael Chiklis, and wondered if he had been in anything before this. I looked up some info online, and while looking backward through his earlier work, Wired was buried in there. Okay, this search just got very interesting...now, I got to find the damn thing!

Coincidentally, over at Half-Price Books, they were giving their old VHS tapes away for a dollar each, and while I was able to find some good gems to add to my own collection, there was a copy of this movie in one of the cardboard boxes. It went into the small bundle under my arm, and went home with me.

Wow. What a mess!

Sounds like the writers and director was going for a type of angle for the movie not unlike Richard Pryor's Jo Jo Dancer, Your Life Is Calling, but John Belushi's life story was cut and hacked to pieces, in the wrong (and very confusing) order, and certainly not very interesting...at least not by the way the movie presents it. The other confusing aspect it is that not only do they trash Bob Woodward and his controversial biography in the movie, but they obviously use it as source material, and even use the title of it for the movie.

I know that Dan Aykroyd had convinced all the fellow SNL cast members to not have anything to do with this movie, so the producers were left with very little option to "invent" SNL-type skits for scenes from when the two of them were on the show. It's kind of odd how they have the Blues Brothers singing "634-5789", a song that they never did do at the time, but was in Blues Brothers 2000. There is also a rather amusing scene where the two of them are driving in the desert, and Dan wakes up John from a deep (and noisy) sleep, and he shouts and whines about them having driven past Las Vegas without stopping. If only they'd invented the idea of having small dashboard cameras installed in their car to catch the action as they drove, that would have been some funny stuff with just the two of them!

It's a total train-wreck, and a blundered opportunity to have told a good story, so until anyone ever gets around to making a proper bio-pic, this is all we have, and it's hard as hell to sit through.