Saturday Night Dead

By RICHARD CORLISS

WIRED Directed by Larry Peerce; Screenplay by Earl Mac Rauch

Well, they sure could have called it Weird. After all, the main characters in this bonkers biopic are two people John Belushi never met during his brief, explosive life: Bob Woodward, the actor's biographer, and John Belushi dead. You have to cherish the daredevil idiocy of a movie whose climax is a parody of Woodward's legendary deathbed chat with CIA director William Casey. The journalist visits the hotel room where Belushi took his fatal overdose and hallucinates an interview with the dying star. "Breathe for me, Woodward!" the samurai comic cries. And it's hard to hate a docudrama in which Cathy Smith, Belushi's last drug source, materializes in the straight-arrow reporter's fantasy and asks, "How 'bout you, Woody? You want a hit?"

If Woodward does want a hit, he is unlikely to get one from this turkey, overstuffed as it is with mad ambitions and bad karma. Wired wants to turn the story of the Saturday Night Live comedian and gonzo movie star into a cautionary fable about celebrity in the fast lane -- and never mind that some powerful people in the movie business were not eager to see the picture made or released. Reprising Belushi's career without being able to use clips or skits from his most famous work should be challenge enough. But nooo! Wired insists on merging the complex flashback devices of two favorite old movies. So on one swerving narrative track, Woodward (J.T. Walsh), like the reporter in Citizen Kane, gets dirty dish from the star's friends. On the other, an angel of death (Ray Sharkey), a hipster version of the guardian angel in It's a Wonderful Life, escorts the dead Belushi (Michael Chiklis) to the scenes of his ebullient crimes.

Woodward's best seller, though it traced Belushi's last days with a doggedness that would have done the Evangelists proud, was a turgid read that had little feeling for its subject and found no broad meaning in it. At least adapter Earl Mac Rauch (The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai) knows that the only way to pin Belushi and Hollywood is to wax satiric and surrealistic. When the dead Belushi prowls his old haunts in a morgue sheet that looks like a toga out of the Animal House closet, the film almost has style to match its guts. So does Chiklis' boldly percussive performance. But Wired's take on Belushi is so lame and gross that it validates the verdict of a cop in the movie: "He's just another fat junkie who went belly-up."

Was he? Not exactly, though the distinction eludes Wired. Professionally, Belushi was a gifted TV sketch artist who found the wide-screen format confining. Personally, he was a middle-class white kid with an anarchic urge to play the cool black jazzman -- so he partied and bullied and ODed just like his heroes. Early death was only the last piece of the legend this blues brother created for himself. In the film's one good laugh, a physician elicits Belushi's pharmaceutical history and then asks, deadpan, "Next of kin?" Belushi was delivered to his humongous family of fans, who mourned a talent that went up in free-basing flames. But where do you send a killer-B movie like Wired, with many enemies and no mourners?