Wired (film) - Critical Reaction

Critical Reaction

The critical response to Wired was almost uniformly hostile. Wired has an overall approval rating of 0% on Rotten Tomatoes. The film currently holds a 4.0/10 rating on the Internet Movie Database, based on 450 votes.

Leonard Maltin condemned the movie as "the film fiasco of its year" and "mind-numbingly wrongheaded." Maltin noted that Michael Chiklis "looks a little like Belushi but conveys none of his comic genius in some clumsy Saturday Night Live recreations" and that J.T. Walsh, "as Woodward, is an unintentional howl with the decade's most constipated performance."

Writing for The Washington Post, Rita Kempley dismissed the movie as "the silliest celebrity bio since Mommie Dearest" and "a biography without an ounce of soul or a shred of dignity. Billed as a fantasy-comedy-drama, it manages to be none of these. The drama is laughable, the comedy lame, the fantasy without wings." Kempley described the film's direction as "ludicrous," the script as "preposterous," and also criticised Michael Chiklis' portrayal of Belushi: "Sam Kinison might have played the part -- like Belushi, he's obscene, overweight, abusive and mad as hell. Chiklis, who does look and sound like Belushi, is rather cherubic in his movie debut. There's a Bambi-ish quality to his portrait of debauchery, a strangely cute requiem for a funny man."

Also writing for The Washington Post, Desson Howe wondered if this movie is "what the real Belushi's family, friends and fans really need. Certainly Belushi deserves as much scrutiny as the next public figure who died after heavy drug use, but this autopsy seems unnecessary." Howe had no praise for Michael Chiklis' performance as Belushi: "Despite a histrionic outpouring of growls, snorts, yells and re-creations of familiar Belushi shticks, from Jake Elmore to Joe Cocker, Chiklis seems to miss every opportunity to redeem himself. He's loud where he should have been soft, flat where he should have been funny and dead where he should have been alive." Howe also noted that the film version of Woodward "seems to have stumbled out of a "Dragnet" episode."

Vincent Canby for the New York Times described the movie as "a bit fuzzy and off-center." Canby also noted that Chiklis "seems to be doing the role a few years too soon. It's not only that he seems too young, but also that he simply hasn't any idea of what it's like to scrape the bottom of life's barrel." Canby did praise Patti D'Arbanville, "who is exceptionally good as the addict who fatally ministers to Belushi in his last hours. She's a lost, sad character, more vivid than anyone else in the movie."

Roger Ebert for the Chicago Sun-Times wrote that "Maybe there was no way to make a good movie out of this material, not yet, when everyone remembers Belushi and any actor who attempts to play him is sure to suffer by comparison." Awarding Wired 1&1/2 stars out of 4, Ebert noted that Wired "is in some ways a sincere attempt to deal with the material, but it is such an ungainly and hapless movie, so stupidly written, so awkwardly directed and acted, that it never gets off the ground." Ebert also criticized the movie's lack of authenticity: "There should be, at some point in a movie like this, a moment when we have the illusion that we are seeing the real John Belushi... That moment never comes. I always was aware that an actor (Michael Chiklis) was before me on the screen, and that Wired was an ungainly fictional construction. The saddest moments were the ones in which Chiklis attempted to re-create some of Belushi's famous characters and routines. He never gives us a living Belushi, and so why should we care about the movie's dead Belushi?" In his syndicated movie review show Siskel & Ebert, Ebert did concede that Chiklis did a "good job" with his performance.

Roger Hurlburt of the Sun-Sentinel also gave Wired a 1&1/2-star rating, writing that "we have director Larry Peerce thinking he`s Frank Capra doing It's a Wonderful Life, or worse, Charles Dickens reworking A Christmas Carol... As a film that relies on mystical scenes to join together fact, plus appearing and disappearing characters scattered among confusing time sequences, Wired is a movie of overkill. The fact is, Belushi becomes more unlikable, more idiotic and more pathetically self-destructive as the film progresses."

Jay Carr for The Boston Globe dismissed the film as "bummer theater... It's worse than crassly exploitative."

In his review of Wired for the Houston Chronicle, Jeff Millar noted that Michael Chiklis "looks reasonably enough like Belushi, and he impersonates him well enough to make us frustratingly aware that he is not John Belushi... In the sequences when he is asked to imitate Belushi the entertainer, he is desperately overmatched - any actor would be - against the close memory of a hugely idiosyncratic comic actor. All would have prospered with less banging of head against that immovable object and more time spent with the off-screen Belushi, whose facsimile is unknown to the consuming public... Wired is as fragmented as all get out. It does evoke, one supposes, the sort of maxed-out, destructive life Belushi led. But a price has to be paid. The filmmakers hit upon something that interests us emotionally, but they're so committed to the unstructured structure that they feel obliged to zip away before we have time to get involved... hasn't a center, a point of focus. Finally, you wonder, what is this movie about? It purports to be about the American tragedy of drugs, a tragedy that strikes our best and brightest. But the film offers nothing revelatory about "why" Belushi was doomed... None of the heavy hitters who blew coke in Woodward's book are anywhere to be seen in the film. Although there is an implied indictment of the world of show business, virtually no one else who might even remotely be associated with a real person in Belushi's life is seen using drugs; indeed, most of the show-biz types give Belushi vigorous anti-drug lectures or flush his toot down the toilet. If this is The Movie Hollywood Didn't Want Made, it looks as though somebody successfully threatened its makers with broken thumbs."

Caryn James for The New York Times began her Wired review with the words, "There is almost no excuse for Wired, a film so devastatingly dull that it seems longer than John Belushi's whole career," before adding "audiences do not like their pop icons tampered with, and in biographical films such tampering is inevitable. Audiences bring to such films vivid images of people they feel they know, and they have consistently rejected films that fail to reflect that image... Any weeknight, viewers can turn on television reruns of the Saturday Night Live shows that made Belushi famous. And no matter how much Michael Chiklis, the star of Wired, resembles Belushi, his Killer Bee and his Joe Cocker imitation are no match for the highly visible, memorable, syndicated originals."

Richard Corliss, in his review of the film for Time Magazine, singled out Michael Chiklis's "boldly percussive performance," but described the movie itself as a "turkey, overstuffed as it is with mad ambitions and bad karma."

Michael Wilmington for the Los Angeles Times praised the performances of Chiklis, D'Arbanville, and Gary Groomes, but had mixed feelings about the film overall, noting that "the crippling flaw in the film lies in its mix of surface daring and inner funk. Inside, it keeps flinching."

Rolling Stone labeled the movie "a howling dog...Whether by design or by forced compromise, Wired is even more of a gloss than the candy-assed view of Jerry Lee Lewis in Great Balls of Fire!. Far from pointing any fingers, Wired the movie hardly names names...it appears that nearly everyone Belushi encountered in big, bad Hollywood tried to warn him off demon drugs. Wired packs all the investigative wallop of a Care Bears flick." The review also criticizes Michael Chiklis for capturing "none of Belushi's charm, warmth or genius. It's excruciating to watch Chiklis drain the wit from such classic Belushi routines as the Samurai, the Bees and the Blues Brothers."

In 2008, writer Nathan Rabin posted a retrospective on Wired for his series "My Year of Flops" on The A.V. Club. Rabin wrote, "To call Wired an unconscionable act of grave robbery/defilement would be an insult to the good name of grave-robbers everywhere. There are snuff films with more integrity... Watching Wired, the two questions that pop up constantly are "What the hell were they thinking?" followed by "What the hell were they smoking, and where can I get some?"... I will give Rauch's screenplay this much: it sure is audacious... Rauch apparently set out to write a biopic as irreverent, wild, and unconventional as Belushi himself. The stakes were high. Had the filmmakers succeeded, they would have reinvented the biopic by injecting it with vast ocean of gallows humor, magic realism, and postmodern mindfuckery. The filmmakers took enormous chances, none of which paid off. They shot for the moon and fell flat on their asses."