Lunch Club! Blues Brothers’ Infamous Mall Chase Scene, Recreated Shot-For-Shot In Lego
If there's one thing that smashes better than a mall, it's tiny little blocks of coloured plastic.
When it came out, 1980’s The Blues Brothers broke the record for the amount of cars destroyed in any one film. If you’ve seen the movie, that won’t surprise you; 103 vehicles were completely totalled, 40 of them wrecked ex-cop cars that had been purchased for $400 each.
The most iconic police chase in the film took place in Chicago’s abandoned $25 million Dixie Square Mall — three minutes packed with police cars crashing into populated shops, as pedestrians run screaming. The fast-paced action was over the top, and undercut by Jake and Elwood’s deadpan narration as the buildings around them were demolished: “Lots of space in this mall”; “Disco pants and haircuts”; “Baby clothes”; “This place has got everything.”
When filming finished, the mall was trashed and the crew left town. No one ever fixed it up, and there are photos to prove it.
Fortunately, reconstructing the entire scene out of Lego is a whole lot cheaper. The below clip was uploaded overnight by an Australian guy called Duncan, the man behind Bricktease.
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Here’s a side-by-side comparison.
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And here’s how it all came together.