YMMV / Wired

• Audience-Alienating Premise: A Biopic about John Belushi? Okay, that sounds harmless enough. John's corpse popping back up to life and then meeting up with his Puerto Rican taxi driving Guardian Angel to reminisce about his life? What? And that's before the heavy-handed Drugs Are Bad message starts getting hammered into you.
• Harsher in Hindsight: Seeing Ray Sharkey's Angel denounce Belushi for drug use and infidelity is difficult due to the actor's own problems in those areas, leading to him contracting AIDs and dying at the age of forty.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: Upon learning that Bob Woodward is going to write a book based on his life called Wired, Angel mocks Belushi that the book is going to trash his good name and Belushi despondently responds "I'm fucked." The Irony was not lost on Brad Jones who remarked, "And that's just the book! You don't even want to tell him about what the movie is gonna do!"
• Nightmare Fuel: The autopsy scene, where John is being cut open by coroners as he screams for help. Also lapses into Accidental Nightmare Fuel, as much of the scene is an attempt at Black Comedy, what with the addition of a Laugh Track and the coroners slowly turning into Hibachi chefs happily slicing up John as if he was fish. Can you really blame John's friends and family for hating this movie when it's forcing them to imagine their late colleague in horrible pain, even in death?
  John: Get me the hell out of here! I'm cold, it's cold—!
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot:
  • A John Belushi Biopic in of itself isn't that bad of an idea, nor is playing it as a comedy with a tone akin to Belushi's films as a way to honor his legacy. But unfortunately, this movie was made by people who seem to just absolutely loathe John and see him as nothing but a depraved drug addict and take every chance to kick him while he's down.
  • The movie also has clashing Framing Devices, either of which could've worked under the right conditions. One is a straightforward, down-to-earth, somber affair where Bob Woodward interviews various colleagues of John's for the Wired book that calls to mind the way Citizen Kane told the life story of its title character. The other is an irreverent, fantasy Black Comedy where John's ghost is guided by his guardian angel through snapshots of his life that seems to be trying to go for the type of humor John's films often went for. Both get stuffed into the movie and so we get a film with a really indecisive tone to approach its subject matter with and both are done with an extreme contempt for Belushi who the film is actively disinterested in treating as anything but a drug addict.
• Took the Bad Film Seriously: For all the film's issues with it's reductive and inaccurate portrayal of John Belushi, its heavy-handed attitude towards his addictions, its moments of tasteless and inappropriate comedy and the poor casting of important supporting players like Dan Aykroyd who was so insulted by its portrayal of his friend he refused to work with people involved in the project, it's generally agreed that Michael Chiklis was a fantastic choice to play Belushi and that he does his very best with the material, perfectly capturing John's manic energy, tics and habits as a performer and his skills at physical comedy and does well in the dramatic scenes too. Brad Jones noticeably gives the film a very harsh review for the above flaws but has nothing but praise for Chiklis, saying he almost makes the film worth watching just to see how good he is. Aykroyd even forgave Chiklis for his involvement years later.
• Unintentional Period Piece: At one point Belushi and his co-writer hire a typist to convert Noble Root from handwritten pages. In the area of personal computers, typing as become a universal skill, making the need for a professional to do the job superfluous.

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