Show Business: End of a Samurai Comic

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Belushi kept insisting that it was all just an act. "If people want to think that I'm a drug-crazed anarchist and it brings them into the theaters, that's fine," he said in 1980. "Actually, I'm a pretty boring guy most of the time." But it was the anarchist image that made him a movie star with Animal House (1978). The role of Bluto Blutarsky was just a featured part, not much larger than the ones he played in Old Boyfriends and Goin' South. But audiences cheered as Bluto bellowed "Food fight!" in a crowded cafeteria, or scaled CONTACT the walls of a sorority, or totaled a small-town parade. Belushi, who left SNL in 1979, teamed with Aykroyd for two even more manic movies, 1941 and The Blues Brothers, which extorted laughs from car and plane wrecks. Trash the world, I want to get off.

In his last two films, Continental Divide and Neighbors, Belushi played ordinary guys beset and attracted by extraordinary eccentrics. He might have been announcing that Animal John was also a mensch, but it is more likely he was simply expanding his range toward more traditional character parts. After a few years of shooting stardom, Belushi was inching to ward mid-life without another climax immediately in view. Now it has found him. In his early days with Lemmings, he had mocked celebrity burnout with the All-Star Dead Band — Jimi Hendrix, Brian Jones, Jim Morrison, Janis Joplin. Less than a decade later, the samurai comic had provided another ghastly punch line to his own joke. This time, no one was laughing.

— By Richard Corliss