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“Elvis” brings all of the glitz, rhinestones, and jumpsuits you’d expect in an Elvis film, but without the necessary complexity for a movie from 2022 about the “King.”

Maximalist filmmaker Baz Luhrmann , who abhors visual restraint and instead opts for grand theatricality, should be the perfect creator for a Presley biopic, but isn't. Luhrmann tells us this icon’s story from the perspective of the singer’s longtime, crooked manager Colonel Tom Parker ( Tom Hanks ). After collapsing in his tacky, memorabilia-filled office, a near-death Parker awakens alone in a Las Vegas hospital room. The papers have labeled him a crook, a cheat who took advantage of Elvis ( Austin Butler ), so he must set the record straight.

From the jump, Luhrmann’s aesthetic language takes hold: An IV-drip turns into the Las Vegas skyline; in a hospital nightgown, Parker walks through a casino until he arrives at a roulette wheel. Carrying a heap of affectations, Hanks plays Parker like the Mouse King in “ The Nutcracker .” For precisely the film’s first half hour, "Elvis" moves like a Christmas fairytale turned nightmare; one fueled not by jealousy but the pernicious clutches of capitalism and racism, and the potent mixture they create.

It’s difficult to wholly explain why “Elvis” doesn’t work, especially because for long stretches it offers rushes of enthralling entertainment. In the early goings-on, Luhrmann and co-writers Sam Bromell , Craig Pearce , and Jeremy Doner meticulously build around Presley’s influences. They explain how Gospel and Blues equally enraptured him—a well-edited, both visually and sonically, sequence mixes the two genres through a sweaty performance of “That’s Alright Mama”—and they also show how much his time visiting on Beale Street informed his style and sound. A performance of “Hound Dog” by Big Mama Thornton ( Shonka Dukureh ), and the emergence of a flashy B.B. King ( Kelvin Harrison Jr.) furthers the point. Presley loves the superhero Shazam, and dreams about reaching the Rock of Eternity, a stand-in for stardom in this case. He’s also a momma’s boy (thankfully Luhrmann doesn’t belabor the death of Elvis’ brother, a biographical fact lampooned by “Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story”).

Though a biopic veteran, Hanks has rarely been a transformative actor. In this case, you can hear his accent slipping back toward Hanks. And the heavy prosthetics do him few favors, robbing him of his facial range—an underrated tool in his repertoire. And Hanks already struggles to play outright villains; shaping the story from his perspective takes the edge off of his potential menace. It’s a tough line for Hanks to walk, to be unsuspecting yet vicious. Hanks creates a friction that doesn’t altogether work, but feels at home in Luhrmann’s heavy reliance on artifice.

The most fascinating linkage in “Elvis” is the extrapolation of commerce and race. Parker is enamored by Presley because he plays Black music but is white. Elvis turns off the white Christian old, like the moribund country singer Hank Snow ( David Wenham ), and the homophobic men who consider him a “fairy.” Yet he excites the young, like Jimmie Rogers ( Kodi Smit-McPhee , both actors provide fantastic comic relief), and he has sex appeal. A wiggle, if you please. Luhrmann takes that wiggle seriously, showing sexually possessed, screaming women. Butler’s crotch, in precisely fitted pink pants and shot in close-up, vibrates. Harsh zooms, quick whip pans, and a taste for horniness (by both men and women) help make the early moments of this biopic so special. As does its anti-capitalist bent, which depicts how often labor, art, and ownership can be spit out and garbled in the destructive system.

Unfortunately, “Elvis” soon slips into staid biopic territory. We see the meteoric rise of Presley, the mistakes—whether by greed or naïveté—he makes along the way, and his ultimate descent toward self-parody. His mother ( Helen Thomson ) dies on the most hackneyed of beats. His father ( Richard Roxburgh ) quivers in the shallowest of ways. Priscilla ( Olivia DeJonge ) appears and is handed standard tragic wife material. The pacing slows, and the story just doesn’t offer enough playfulness or interiority to keep up.

But even so, the latter portions of Luhrmann’s film aren’t without its pleasures: The performance of “Trouble,” whereby Presley defies the Southern racists who fear his Black-infused music (and sensuality) will infiltrate white America, is arresting. Cinematographer Mandy Walker ’s freeze frames imitate black and white photography, like wrapping history in the morning dew. The performance of Elvis’ comeback special, specifically his rendition of “If I Can Dream” soars. During the Vegas sequences, the costumes become ever more elaborate, the make-up ever more garish, acutely demonstrating Presley’s physical decline. And Butler, an unlikely Elvis, tightly grips the reins by providing one show-stopping note after another. There isn’t a hint of fakery in anything Butler does. That sincerity uplifts “Elvis” even as it tumbles.

But all too often the film slips into a great white hope syndrome, whereby Presley is the sincere white hero unearthing the exotic and sensual Black artists of his era. B.B. King, Big Momma Thornton, and Little Richard (real-life supporters of Presley) exist solely as either bulletin board cheerleaders or alluring beings from a far-off land. While these Black artists are championed—an awareness by Luhrmann of their importance and the long and winding history of Black art moving through white spaces—they barely speak or retain any depth, even while a paternalistic Presley advances their cause.

The approach neither illuminates nor dignifies these figures. Instead, Luhrmann tries to smooth over the complicated feelings many Black folks of varied generations have toward the purported King. In that smoothing, Presley loses enough danger, enough fascinating complications to render the whole enterprise predictable. Because it’s not enough to merely have awareness, a filmmaker also has a responsibility to question whether they’re the right person to tell a story. Luhrmann isn’t. And that’s a failing that will be difficult for many viewers to ignore.

Luhrmann side-steps other parts of the Elvis mythology, including the age gap between Priscilla and Presley (the pair met in Germany when the former was 14 years old), and when Elvis became a stooge for Richard Nixon . Excluding the latter makes little sense in a movie concerning the commodification of Presley by capitalism and conservatism. Luhrmann wants to show the downfall of a doe-eyed icon by nefarious systems, but never pushes the envelope enough for him to become unlikable, or better yet, intricate and human.

That flattening easily arises from telling this story from Colonel Parker’s perspective. He doesn’t care about Black people, therefore, they exist as cardboard cutouts. He cares little for Priscilla, therefore, she has little personhood. And Parker certainly isn’t going to tarnish the image or brand of Elvis because it corrodes himself. These undesirable outcomes, facile and pointless, make logical sense considering the framing of the narrative. But what good is making a sanitized Elvis biopic in 2022? And truly, who really needs a further fortification of Presley’s cultural importance when it’s been the dominant strain for over 60 years? It’s another noxious draft in history clumsily written by white hands.

“Elvis” certainly works as a jukebox, and it does deliver exactly what you’d expect from a Luhrmann movie. But it never gets close to Presley; it never deals with the knotty man inside the jumpsuit; it never grapples with the complications in his legacy. It’s overstuffed, bloated, and succumbs to trite biopic decisions. Luhrmann always puts Butler in the best position to succeed until the credits, whereby he cuts to archival footage of Presley singing “Unchained Melody.” In that moment Luhrmann reminds you of the myth-making at play. Which is maybe a good thing, given Luhrmann's misleading, plasticine approach.

Now playing in theaters.

Robert Daniels

Robert Daniels is an Associate Editor at RogerEbert.com. Based in Chicago, he is a member of the Chicago Film Critics Association (CFCA) and Critics Choice Association (CCA) and regularly contributes to the New York Times , IndieWire , and Screen Daily . He has covered film festivals ranging from Cannes to Sundance to Toronto. He has also written for the Criterion Collection, the Los Angeles Times , and Rolling Stone about Black American pop culture and issues of representation.

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Film credits.

Elvis (2022)

Rated PG-13 for substance abuse, strong language, suggestive material and smoking.

159 minutes

Austin Butler as Elvis Presley

Tom Hanks as Colonel Tom Parker

Olivia DeJonge as Priscilla Presley

Dacre Montgomery as Steve Binder

Kelvin Harrison Jr. as B.B. King

Richard Roxburgh as Vernon Presley

Helen Thomson as Gladys Presley

Yola as Sister Rosetta Tharpe

David Wenham as Hank Snow

Luke Bracey as Jerry Schilling

Alex Radu as George Klein

Alton Mason as Little Richard

Xavier Samuel as Scotty Moore

Kodi Smit-McPhee as Jimmie Rodgers Snow

Natasha Bassett as Dixie Locke

Leon Ford as Tom Diskin

Baz Luhrmann

Writer (story by)

Jeremy Doner
Sam Bromell
Craig Pearce

Cinematographer

Mandy Walker
Jonathan Redmond
Elliott Wheeler

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‘Elvis’ Review: Shocking the King Back to Life

Austin Butler plays the singer, with Tom Hanks as his devilish manager, in Baz Luhrmann’s operatic, chaotic anti-biopic.

By A.O. Scott

My first and strongest memory of Elvis Presley is of his death. He was only 42 but he already seemed, in 1977, to belong to a much older world. In the 45 years since, his celebrity has become almost entirely necrological. Graceland is a pilgrimage spot and a mausoleum.

Baz Luhrmann’s “Elvis” — a biopic in the sense that “Heartbreak Hotel” is a Yelp review — works mightily to dispel this funerary gloom. Luhrmann, whose relationship to the past has always been irreverent and anti-nostalgic, wants to shock Elvis back to life, to imagine who he was in his own time and what he might mean in ours.

The soundtrack shakes up the expected playlist with jolts of hip-hop (extended into a suite over the final credits), slivers of techno and slatherings of synthetic film-score schmaltz. (The composer and executive music producer is Elliott Wheeler.) The sonic message — and the film’s strongest argument for its subject’s relevance — is that Presley’s blend of blues, gospel, pop and country continues to mutate and pollinate in the musical present. There’s still a whole lot of shaking going on.

As a movie, though, “Elvis” lurches and wobbles, caught in a trap only partly of its own devising. Its rendering of a quintessentially American tale of race, sex, religion and money teeters between glib revisionism and zombie mythology, unsure if it wants to be a lavish pop fable or a tragic melodrama.

The ghoulish, garish production design, by Catherine Martin (Luhrmann’s wife and longtime creative partner) and Karen Murphy, is full of carnival sleaze and Vegas vulgarity. All that satin and rhinestone, filtered through Mandy Walker’s pulpy, red-dominated cinematography, conjures an atmosphere of lurid, frenzied eroticism. You might mistake this for a vampire movie.

It wouldn’t entirely be a mistake. The central plot casts Elvis (Austin Butler) as the victim of a powerful and devious bloodsucking fiend. That would be Col. Tom Parker, who supplies voice-over narration and is played by Tom Hanks with a mountain of prosthetic goo, a bizarre accent and a yes-it’s-really-me twinkle in his eyes. Parker was Presley’s manager for most of his career, and Hanks portrays him as part small-time grifter, part full-blown Mephistopheles.

“I didn’t kill Elvis,” Parker says, though the movie implies otherwise. “I made Elvis.” In the Colonel’s mind, they were “the showman and the snowman,” equal partners in a supremely lucrative long con.

Luhrmann’s last feature was an exuberant, candy-colored — and, I thought, generally underrated — adaptation of “The Great Gatsby,” and the Colonel is in some ways a Gatsbyesque character. He’s a self-invented man, an arriviste on the American scene, a “mister nobody from nowhere” trading in the unstable currencies of wishing and seeming. He isn’t a colonel (Elvis likes to call him “admiral”) and his real name isn’t Tom Parker. The mystery of his origins is invoked to sinister effect but not fully resolved. If we paid too much attention to him, he might take over the movie, something that almost happens anyway.

Luhrmann seems more interested in the huckster than in the artist. But he himself is the kind of huckster who understands the power of art, and is enough of an artist to make use of that power.

As a Presley biography, “Elvis” is not especially illuminating. The basic stuff is all there, as it would be on Wikipedia. Elvis is haunted by the death of his twin brother, Jesse, and devoted to his mother, Gladys (Helen Thomson). Relations with his father, Vernon (Richard Roxburgh), are more complicated. The boy grows up poor in Tupelo, Miss., and Memphis, finds his way into the Sun Records recording studio at the age of 19, and proceeds to set the world on fire. Then there’s the Army, marriage to Priscilla (Olivia DeJonge), Hollywood, a comeback broadcast in 1968, a long residency in Las Vegas, divorce from Priscilla and the sad, bloated spectacle of his last years.

Butler is fine in the few moments of offstage drama that the script allows, but most of the emotional action is telegraphed in Luhrmann’s usual emphatic, breathless style. The actor seems most fully Elvis — as Elvis, the film suggests, was most truly himself — in front of an audience. Those hips don’t lie, and Butler captures the smoldering physicality of Elvis the performer, as well as the playfulness and vulnerability that drove the crowds wild. The voice can’t be imitated, and the movie wisely doesn’t try, remixing actual Elvis recordings rather than trying to replicate them.

At his first big performance, in a dance hall in Texarkana, Ark., where he shares a bill with Hank Snow (David Wenham), Snow’s son, Jimmie (Kodi Smit-McPhee), and other country acts, Elvis steps out in a bright pink suit, heavy eye makeup and glistening pompadour. A guy in the audience shouts a homophobic slur, but after a few bars that guy’s date and every other woman in the room is screaming her lungs out, “having feelings she’s not sure she should enjoy,” as the Colonel puts it. Gladys is terrified, and the scene carries a heavy charge of sexualized danger. Elvis is a modern Orpheus, and these maenads are about to tear him to pieces. In another scene, back in Memphis, Elvis watches Little Richard (Alton Mason) tearing up “Tutti Frutti” (a song he would later cover) and sees a kindred spirit.

The sexual anarchy and gender nonconformity of early rock ’n’ roll is very much in Luhrmann’s aesthetic wheelhouse. Its racial complications less so. “Elvis” puts its hero in the presence of Black musicians including Sister Rosetta Tharpe (Yola), Big Mama Thornton (Shonka Dukureh) and B.B. King (Kelvin Harrison Jr.), who offers career advice. An early montage — repeated so often that it becomes a motif — finds the boy Elvis (Chaydon Jay) simultaneously peeking into a juke joint where Arthur Crudup (Gary Clark Jr.) plays “That’s All Right Mama” and catching the spirit at a tent revival.

There’s no doubt that Elvis, like many white Southerners of his class and generation, loved blues and gospel. (He loved country and western, too, a genre the film mostly dismisses.) He also profited from the work of Black musicians and from industry apartheid, and a movie that won’t grapple with the dialectic of love and theft that lies at the heart of American popular music can’t hope to tell the whole story.

In the early days, Elvis’s nemesis is the segregationist Mississippi senator James Eastland (Nicholas Bell), whose fulminations against sex, race-mixing and rock ’n’ roll are intercut with a galvanic performance of “Trouble.” Later, Elvis is devastated by the assassinations of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. (who was killed “just three miles from Graceland”) and Robert F. Kennedy. These moments, which try to connect Elvis with the politics of his era, are really episodes in his relationship with Colonel Parker, who wants to keep his cash cow away from controversy.

When Elvis defies the Colonel — breaking out in full hip-shaking gyrations when he’s been told “not to wiggle so much as a finger”; turning a network Christmas special into a sweaty, intimate, raucous return to form — the movie wants us to see his conscience at work, as well as his desire for creative independence. But Luhrmann’s sense of history is too muddled and sentimental to give the gestures that kind of weight.

And Elvis himself remains a cipher, a symbol, more myth than flesh and blood. His relationships with Vernon, Priscilla and the entourage known as “the Memphis mafia” receive cursory treatment. His appetites for food, sex and drugs barely get that much.

Who was he? The movie doesn’t provide much of an answer. But younger viewers, whose firsthand experience of the King is even thinner than mine, might come away from “Elvis” with at least an inkling of why they should care. In the end, this isn’t a biopic or a horror movie or a cautionary parable: It’s a musical, and the music is great. Remixed, yes, and full of sounds that purists might find anachronistic. But there was never anything pure about Elvis Presley, except maybe his voice, and hearing it in all its aching, swaggering glory, you understand how it set off an earthquake.

Like a lot of people who write about American popular culture — or who just grew up in the second half of the 20th century — I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about Elvis. “Elvis,” for all its flaws and compromises, made me want to listen to him, as if for the first time.

Elvis Rated PG-13. Rock ’n’ roll, sex, drugs. Running time: 2 hours 39 minutes. In theaters.

A.O. Scott is a co-chief film critic. He joined The Times in 2000 and has written for the Book Review and The New York Times Magazine. He is also the author of “Better Living Through Criticism.” More about A.O. Scott

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Austin butler and tom hanks in baz luhrmann’s ‘elvis’: film review | cannes 2022.

The King of Rock and Roll gets suitably electrified biopic treatment in this kinetic vision of his life and career through the eyes of the financial abuser who controlled him.

By David Rooney

David Rooney

Chief Film Critic

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Austin Butler as Elvis Presley in ELVIS, 2022.

How you feel about Baz Luhrmann ’s Elvis will depend largely on how you feel about Baz Luhrmann’s signature brash, glitter-bomb maximalism. Just the hyper-caffeinated establishing section alone — even before Austin Butler ’s locomotive hips start doing their herky-jerky thing when Elvis Presley takes to the stage to perform “Heartbreak Hotel” in a rockabilly-chic pink suit — leaves you dizzy with its frenetic blast of scorching color, split screen, retro graphics and more edits per scene than a human eye can count. Add in the stratified, ear-bursting sound design and this is Baz times a bazillion.

If the writing too seldom measures up to the astonishing visual impact, the affinity the director feels for his showman subject is both contagious and exhausting. Luhrmann’s taste for poperatic spectacle is evident all the way, resulting in a movie that exults in moments of high melodrama as much as in theatrical artifice and vigorously entertaining performance.

Full credits

Venue: Cannes Film Festival (Out of Competition) Distribution: Warner Bros. Production companies: Bazmark, Jackal Group Cast: Austin Butler, Tom Hanks, Helen Thomson, Richard Roxburgh, Olivia DeJonge, Luke Bracey, Natasha Bassett, David Wenham, Kelvin Harrison Jr., Xavier Samuel, Kodi Smit-McPhee, Dacre Montgomery, Leon Ford, Kate Mulvany, Gareth Davies, Charles Grounds, Josh McConville, Adam Dunn, Yola, Alton Mason, Gary Clark Jr., Shonka Dukureh, Chaydon Jay Director: Baz Luhrmann Screenwriters: Baz Luhrmann, Sam Bromell, Craig Pearce, Jeremy Doner; story by Luhrmann and Doner Producers: Baz Luhrmann, Catherine Martin, Gail Berman, Patrick McCormick, Schuyler Weiss Executive producers: Toby Emmerich, Courtenay Valenti, Kevin McCormack Director of photography: Mandy Walker Production designers: Catherine Martin, Karen Murphy Costume designer: Catherine Martin Music: Elliott Wheeler Music supervisor: Anton Monsted Editors: Matt Villa, Jonathan Redmond Visual effects supervisor: Thomas Wood Casting: Nikki Barrett

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‘Elvis’ Review: Baz Luhrmann’s Deliriously Awful Biopic Is ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ at 4,000 M.P.H.

David ehrlich.

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Editor’s note: This review was originally published at the 2022 Cannes Film Festival. Warner Bros. releases the film in theaters on Friday, June 24.

“It doesn’t matter if you do 10 stupid things so long as you do one smart one,” Colonel Tom Parker advises us near the start of Baz Luhrmann ’s utterly deranged musical biopic about the King of Rock & Roll, but even a ratio that forgiving would still leave “ Elvis ” roughly 370 “smart ones” short. If only this 159-minute eyesore — a sadistically monotonous super-montage in which a weird Flemish guy manipulates some naïve young greaser over and over and over again until they both get sad and die — were gracious enough to be as short in any other respect.

Luhrmann may be one of the most irrepressible maximalists the movies have ever known, and his new opus is perhaps the most visually anarchic Hollywood film since the Wachowskis’ 2008 “Speed Racer.” But it’s hard to find even ironic enjoyment in something this high on its own supply; something much less interested in how its namesake broke the rules than it is in how its director does, and something tirelessly incapable of finding any meaningful overlap between the two.

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Indeed, “Elvis” is so adoring of its style and so disinterested in its subject that “Baz” would have been a more fitting title for it. Why does a deliriously basic musical biopic spinning through time at 60 million RPM take longer to give Elvis Presley the “Bohemian Rhapsody” treatment than Luhrmann needed to adapt “Romeo and Juliet,” “The Great Gatsby,” or the entire continent of “Australia”? Because the “Moulin Rouge!” director — despite his obvious affection for Elvis, and his good-faith effort to worship the rock god as he saw fit — can’t help but leverage Presley’s iconography in a similarly self-serving way as Parker exploited his talent.

Unmoored from the narrative guardrails of a Puccini opera, a Shakespeare tragedy, or one of the tightest novels of the 20th century, Luhrmann is free to remix Elvis’ life and times into a Las Vegas revue that spotlights the filmmaker’s singular genius while also painfully enabling his own addiction to excess. Even in tribute, this maddening jukebox musical only sees Presley as a means to an end — as a hip-shaking puppet on a string. Which perhaps explains why Luhrmann was compelled to make Colonel Tom Parker the main character of his Elvis movie, “Elvis,” which the trailers had suggested was about someone named Elvis.

This may not be the stupidest of the stupid things that “Elvis” does, but it’s the stupid thing that no amount of “smart ones” can possibly balance out. Luhrmann loves himself a narrator — a layer of distance between opulence and tragedy — and theoretically, there’s no reason why one of pop culture’s most pivotal rise-and-fall stories couldn’t be told through the eyes of the Mephisto-like Svengali who launched Presley into the air and left him there in a permanent state of vertigo.

Sure, on paper that sounds roughly as appealing as a Britney Spears biopic narrated by her father. And sure, onscreen it’s even worse. But it isn’t impossible to see the appeal of placing an iconoclastic anti-authoritarian like Elvis in the shadow of the man who controlled him. Even the King bowed to someone, and Luhrmann’s dizzying script (co-written by Sam Bromell, Jeremy Doner, and Craig Pearce) frequently returns to the idea that Presley’s life was caught in the crossfire between two different Americas: One gyrating towards freedom, and the other snuffing it out.

The problem here is that Luhrmann’s Colonel Parker — Tom Hanks in a “true true” performance defined by a fat suit, a fake nose, and an accent that I can only describe as the “Kentucky Fried Goldmember” — is possibly the most insufferable movie character ever conceived. The guy makes Jar-Jar Binks seem like Elliott Gould in “The Long Goodbye.” It’s as if Luhrmann watched Hanks’ performance from “The Ladykillers” and thought: “OK, what if that, but times 100 and for almost three entire hours?”

“Elvis” — and I wish I were joking about this — is presented as the dream that Colonel Parker has before dying. Kind of. Honestly, it’s hard to say where you are or in what context during a movie that spins in circles like a roulette wheel (often all too literally) and only slows down for a small handful of proper scenes along the way. One second, Colonel Parker is waddling around a Las Vegas hospital as an old man, and the next, we’re in full “Nightmare Alley” territory as the music impresario rolls through some hick fairground and hears a hot new song on the radio while looking for his next carnival geek.

Too bad Black acts don’t sell. Wait a minute! [the camera zooms in on Parker’s neck sweat, spins 360 degrees, speed-ramps through several different frame rates, invents six entirely new aspect ratios, and then lands on the prosthetic nose that only skirts anti-Semitism because no one knows for sure if the Colonel was Jewish] “he’s whhhhyyyyyiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiittteee!?” [cash registers, fireworks, time moves in 12 directions at once, you see the moment of your own birth and death unfolding on a Brian de Palma split-screen]. Cut to: Elvis playing “That’s All Right” in an oversized pink suit as a concert for some local teenage girls suddenly turns into that scene from “Scanners.”

That won’t be the last time Luhrmann acknowledges his subject’s oft-discussed role in the history of American race relations — just wait until the feverish sequence where Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination is framed as something that personally happened to Elvis Presley, and made him feel very sad — but it’s safe to assume that “Elvis” is less interested in the cultural etymology of Presley’s music than it is in the way that stiff ribbons of jet-black hair falls across Austin Butler ’s face every time he sweet talks into a microphone.

In fairness to Luhrmann, it’s quite a sight to behold. Butler’s immaculate Presley imitation would be the best thing about this movie even if it stopped at mimicry, but the actor does more than just nail Presley’s singing voice and stage presence; he also manages to defy them, slipping free of iconography and giving the film an opportunity to create a new emotional context for a man who’s been frozen in time since before Luhrmann’s target audience was born.

It’s an opportunity the director rejects at every turn. His Elvis never becomes his own man. Instead, he evolves from an avatar for post-war America into a helpless addict trapped in a golden cage. He doesn’t have a whit of agency in either mode; pin-balling through the years and bouncing from one superimposed newspaper headline to the next, Elvis doesn’t come off like someone who reshaped the 20th century so much as he does someone who watched it faint around him and then force him out. No wonder Elvis and Forrest Gump seem to keep crossing paths.

Rather than carving a meaningful path to guide Elvis through history, Luhrmann simply floats him through the years on a raft of non-stop music that bumps into an endless series of biopic clichés at light speed into the next until it finally capsizes a few decades later. The action moves so fast, and with so little weight, that I literally missed Elvis’ mom dying.

Then again, I hardly ever clocked her being alive in the first place. I only flagged his dad because Vernon is played by Luhrmann regular Richard Roxburgh, while Olivia DeJonge’s Priscilla skips from army brat to shrewish mom without stopping to land anywhere in between. At some point they mention Graceland, so there’s probably a scene where they buy it? I’d assume I just forgot a detail like that in the blur of it all if not for the fact that Elvis’ entire film career is squeezed into a single line of Colonel Parker narration that I transcribed verbatim for my sins: “I made him the highest-paid actor in Hollywood history, and we had a lot of fun.” Terrible food, and such small portions.

The songs themselves can be thrilling when they’re anchored in reality — the late scene in which a sequined Elvis powers his way through “Suspicious Minds” is almost strong enough to give the character his own soul — but most of them come from nowhere, floating at random out of the ether as if from a broken jukebox. There’s nary a single moment in the movie of Elvis actually creating anything; he’s just a sexy oracle, receiving music from the collective unconscious and shivering it out through his body.

It’s as if Presley’s songs have always existed, and Luhrmann’s job is simply to make them new again. The filmmaker’s anachronistic flair has always been a fundamental part of his appeal, but here — listening to Doja Cat rap over “Viva Las Vegas,” which sounds pretty good — it’s hard not to suspect that his orgiastic exuberance might stem from a lack of faith in a modern audience’s ability to connect to this subject matter. If Luhrmann trusted us to care about Elvis Presley, his film would have found the confidence to try. Instead, Colonel Parker becomes the ultimate scapegoat; it’s OK that Elvis doesn’t have any discernible identity because this is a movie about the cartoonish chicken salesman who stole it from him.

Luhrmann’s sensory overload has resulted in some of the most swooningly electric moments in modern cinema, from the fish tank sequence in “Romeo + Juliet” to the elephant medley in “Moulin Rouge!” and that fantastic party sequence in “The Great Gatsby,” but the hyper-romantic energy of those films helped braid the present into the past in a way that made them both feel more alive. “Elvis” discovers no such purpose. It finds so little reason for Presley’s life to be the stuff of a Baz Luhrmann movie that the equation ultimately inverts itself, leaving us with an Elvis Presley movie about Baz Luhrmann. They both deserve better.

“Elvis” premiered at the 2022 Cannes Film Festival. Warner Bros. will release it in theaters on Friday, June 24.

Elvis review – blistering, turbocharged chronicle of the King

With electrifying performances from Austin Butler as Elvis and Tom Hanks as Colonel Parker, Baz Luhrmann’s whirlwind biopic is cinematic dynamite

F rom an opening that cheekily evokes the dropped snow globe of Citizen Kane to an Unchained Melody finale that had me crying in the chapel, Baz Luhrmann ’s Elvis is a turned-up-to-11 treat. This blistering pop biopic combines the kinetic musical madness of Moulin Rouge! with the turbo-charged irreverence of The Great Gatsby , the Shakespearian tragedy of Romeo+Juliet (with an added touch of Falstaff and Prince Hal) and the “what- all -of-it!?” ambition of Australia . It’s a riotously audacious work, a kaleidoscopic portrait of the king of rock’n’roll and his puppet-master promoter, the latter of whom narrates the story (like Salieri in Amadeus ) and who tells his money-spinning client: “We are the same, you and I – two odd, lonely children, reaching for eternity.”

“Without me there would be no Elvis Presley ,” drawls Tom Hanks’s Colonel Tom Parker (aka Dutchman Andreas Cornelis van Kuijk), a “snowman” or carnival huckster who does his deals on a Ferris wheel and who sounds genuinely amazed that “there are some who make me out to be the villain of this story!” Most will share that view as the curtain comes down on this whirlwind chronicle of a career from which Parker took 50% of the profits and 100% of the control. Yet for all his monstrousness, Hanks’s prosthetically enhanced antihero has just enough wheedling pathos to make us understand how he wormed his way into Elvis’s confidence. With a sing-song voice that is part Elmer Fudd, part Lugosi’s Dracula, we watch him usurp first Elvis’s much-mourned mother, Gladys, and then his idolised wife, Priscilla, in the inner circle of trust, casting himself as Presley’s closest confidant and making him a star even while strangling his artistic ambition.

Of the actors who have previously tried to bottle Elvis’s lightning-like magic – from Kurt Russell in John Carpenter’s Elvis and Rob Youngblood in Elvis and the Colonel (both made-for-TV productions) to a spectral Val Kilmer in Tony Scott’s True Romance , Bruce Campbell in the bonkers Bubba Ho-Tep and, more recently, Michael Shannon in the goofy Elvis & Nixon – none has come close to the physical, emotional, electrical energy that throbs through Austin Butler’s titular performance here. An early scene of his pink-pegged Presley performing Baby, Let’s Play House on the Louisiana Hayride is pure cinematic dynamite, with the orgasmic reactions of girls in the crowd as elegantly choreographed as Elvis’s gyrations (part religious ecstasy, part blushing burlesque) by movement maestro Polly Bennett.

No sooner has Presley made headlines than Parker has slipped his “wiggling boy” into the army, Luhrmann’s film falling in line with the increasingly popular notion that the colonel used Presley’s national service as a tool to give himself breathing space – room to control and neuter his creation. When Elvis gets out of the army, his rebellious zest is tamed by a string of anaemic Hollywood movies – money-spinning but moribund. Later, we’ll hear of Barbra Streisand’s offer for Presley to share her screen in A Star Is Born (a project Parker reportedly nixed because it wasn’t his project), prompting Elvis’s heartbreaking admission that “I never made that classic film that I can be proud of”.

Austin Butler as Elvis and Olivia DeJonge as Priscilla

Cheeky but effective dramatic liberties are taken with the clashing plans for what became known as the ’ 68 Comeback Special (Parker is comically pictured still wondering when the snow and Santa Claus songs are coming, even as Elvis rocks out in black leather). It’s a nice touch to have a picture of Nichelle Nichols’s pioneering Lt Uhura from Star Trek looking down from the TV studio walls as everyone but the colonel wises up to the fact that the times they are a-changing.

There’s nothing subtle about Parker banking on his prize dancing chicken clearing his gambling debts while Elvis belts out Suspicious Minds on stage, a lucrative residency at the Vegas International (weeks that turn into years) imprisoning him as clearly as Michael Corleone in The Godfather . Taking a lead from the 1972 film Elvis on Tour , the third act of Elvis’s life is presented in a split-screen haze, with Dr Nichopoulos pumping him full of drugs as Parker insists that “the only thing that matters is that that man gets up on that stage tonight ”.

Parker aside, Luhrmann’s co-writers Sam Bromell, Craig Pearce and Jeremy Doner are clear on the true roots of Presley’s success, from scenes of the young Elvis feeling the gospel spirit move him in church to Big Mama Thornton rocking Hound Dog upstairs at Club Handy, Little Richard offering flamboyant inspiration and Mahalia Jackson making “the music that makes me happy”. A poignant drop of Elvis’s spoken-word Men with Broken Hearts amid the end credits vocals of In the Ghetto is the cherry on the cake of a film that knows its subject, but isn’t afraid to play fast and loose with a familiar tune.

Mark Kermode's film of the week
Elvis Presley
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Elvis review: Baz Luhrmann’s sweaty, seductive biopic makes the King cool again

In luhrmann’s fairytale vision, elvis’ manager (tom hanks) is the evil stepmother, while austin butler’s king is the princess locked in a tower, article bookmarked.

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Dir: Baz Luhrmann. Starring: Austin Butler, Tom Hanks, Helen Thomson, Richard Roxburgh, Olivia DeJonge, Kelvin Harrison Jr, Shonka Dukureh . 12A, 160 minutes.

If we were to pull back the curtain on Elvis Presley, what would we even want to see? A soul stripped of its performance? Something cold and real behind the kitsch? I’m not convinced. America’s pop icons aren’t merely shiny distractions. They’re a culture talking back to itself, constantly interrogating its own ideals and its desires. I don’t think who Elvis was is necessarily more important than what Elvis represents. And, while you won’t find all that much truth in Baz Luhrmann ’s cradle-to-grave dramatisation of his life, the Australian filmmaker has delivered something far more compelling: an American fairytale.

“I am the man who gave the world Elvis Presley,” utters Tom Hanks ’s Colonel Tom Parker, his manager, as the curtain rises (literally) on Luhrmann’s expansive, rhinestone-encrusted epic. “And yet there are some who would make me out to be the villain of this story,” he adds.

Parker, who saw early promise in Elvis’s politically radical blend of country and R’n’B, slyly positioned himself as the sole overseer of the star’s creative enterprise – the man who won him a recording contract with RCA Records, who secured his merchandising deals and TV appearances, and who navigated him through a fairly brief but bountiful acting career. But Parker took far more in return. In 1980, a judge ruled that he had defrauded the Presley estate by millions. Some even blame him for pushing an overworked Elvis to the brink and ultimately contributing to his death.

For Luhrmann, the fairytale parallels couldn’t be more obvious. Parker is the evil stepmother, Elvis (here played by former child star Austin Butler ) is the princess locked in her tower – if that tower is, in fact, the vast and gilded stage of his Las Vegas residency. When Parker, a former carnival worker, first seduces Elvis to become his client, it’s in a literal hall of mirrors. That may sound a little absurd, but Luhrmann’s roots in the Australian opera scene have granted him a winning (though, to some, divisive) ability to deliver baroque stylings with a sincere, romantic sensibility.

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I’ve always believed strongly in the purpose and necessity of Luhrmann’s outlandish visions – that it’s not enough simply to capture the grotesque consumption of The Great Gatsby ’s Jazz Age, but to prove that we, the audience, would be as weak to its charms as Fitzgerald’s protagonist, Nick Carraway. The same is true here, in the ways his subject is both seduced and betrayed by his own fame. And, anyway, Luhrmann’s always shot his films a little like Elvis performs – sweaty and kinetic, as the camera sweeps through the corridors of Graceland and through decades of his life with the fury of a thousand karate kicks.

Elvis will, and should, invite serious discussions about the musician’s outstanding legacy, and the film’s weakest spots speak mostly to how unsettled the debate around him still is. There’s certainly a lot to be said for how nervously the film tiptoes around his relationship with Priscilla (Olivia DeJonge), who was 14 when they first met. Can a film speak on behalf of a woman who’s still alive and able to share her own story? And where do we settle on the great debate of Elvis’s wider role in music history? Was his success really another chapter in white America’s long history of cultural appropriation, or did that early, rebellious appeal in fact prove to be a surprisingly powerful tool in the fight against segregation?

Luhrmann’s film arguably offers the most plausible, romantic ideal of Elvis, even if it turns him into something of a naïf trapped under Parker’s spell. He is always, in Parker’s narration, referred to as “the boy” and never “the man”. He is the sweet-souled, blue-eyed momma’s boy who just wants to buy his family a Cadillac and play the music of his childhood, which was spent in the Black-majority communities of Mississippi. Even at the height of Elvis’s fame, the film is careful to constantly bring us back to the Black artists who inspired him, either through the musician’s own words (and he was always deferential to his origins, to the very end) or through Matt Villa and Jonathan Redmond’s frenetic editing work. When singer-songwriter Big Mama Thornton (Shonka Dukureh) launches into her rendition of “Hound Dog”, a voice on the radio commands us to listen – this is the voice of Black America speaking.

By framing Elvis’s story through Parker’s, Luhrmann’s film is cannily able to take a step back from the intimate details of the musician’s life. Instead it views him as a nuclear warhead of sensuality and cool, someone stood at the very crossroads of a fierce culture war. Parker thinks he can turn him into a clean-cut, all-American boy for the white middle classes, compelling him to accept the draft, cut his locks, and go to war. Elvis resists, and his gyrating pelvis (captured in many, glorious, zooms to the crotch) helps fuel the burgeoning sexual independence of young women across the country. “She’s having feelings she wasn’t sure she should enjoy,” Parker notes, as the camera surveys one wide-eyed, lip-biting fan. Costume designer Catherine Martin – Luhrmann’s spouse, credited also as co-production designer and producer – dresses Elvis in an array of soft, dreamy pinks to sublime effect.

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To say that Elvis isn’t really so much about the real Elvis might sound like it’s taking the pressure off of Butler’s performance. But that’d be an entirely unfair judgement of what’s being achieved here – an impersonation of one of the most impersonated people on the planet, that’s at times uncanny without ever coming across as parody. Sure, Butler has the looks, the voice, the stance and the wiggle nailed down, but what’s truly impressive is that indescribable, undistillable essence of Elvis-ness – magnetic and gentle and fierce, all at the same time.

It’s almost odd to watch a performance so all-consuming that Hanks – the Tom Hanks – feels like an accessory. He’s all but buried underneath layers of prosthetics and a pantomime Dutch accent, seemingly cast only so that the warm smirk of America’s dad can trip a few people into questioning whether he’s really the villain of all this. Butler makes a compelling argument for the power of Elvis, at a time when the musician’s arguably lost a little of his cultural cachet. So does Luhrmann. So does the soundtrack, which is packed with contemporary artists (Doja Cat’s “Vegas” has sound of the summer written all over it). And while not everyone will be convinced by their efforts – I know that I’m ready for Elvis to be cool again.

‘Elvis’ is released in cinemas on 24 June

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Screen Rant

10 unpopular opinions about the elvis movie, according to reddit.

Baz Luhrmann's Elvis has been a huge hit with most audiences, but some fans have taken to Reddit to voice their unpopular opinion about the biopic.

With Elvis now streaming on HBO Max, fans can relive the excitement of The King's meteoric rise to stardom against the fantastical backdrop of Baz Luhrmann's signature film making style. Audiences have praised the musical biopic for its depiction of Elvis Presley's fame, from his early Memphis days on Beale Street to his troubled residency in Las Vegas, anchored by an intense and authentic performance by Austin Butler and a hypnotic attention to detail.

For all the praise that the film has received over the last several months, there are fans who have taken to Reddit to voice their unpopular opinions about its execution. From the acting and creative choices, to the omission of certain aspects of Elvis's life, their perspectives are as wild as Elvis himself.

It Doesn't Deserve Such A High Rating On IMDb

Elvis currently sits with a 7.6/10 rating on IMDb, a respectable score for a biopic about a controversial figure in music history and directed by an equally controversial director. Due to their distinctly exaggerated artistic styles, it's difficult to have lukewarm opinion about either Elvis Presley or Baz Luhrmann. Some fans believe the rating is too high given the way the subject matter was portrayed.

One Redditor was "expecting a biopic about Elvis Presley… Not an over dramatised, minimal dialogue, mediocre movie with no character development." Luhrmann's vision might be sensational, but so was Elvis's career and public persona. Also, it should be noted that many details of Elvis's life were well-researched, and even if the movie's aesthetic wasn't universally liked, Austin Butler's powerful central performance across three decades can also be attributed for the movie's overall higher score.

It's Not Accurate

Some fans hoping for a more accurate depiction of Elvis's life may find the biopic lacking in that area, but Luhrmann has never gone on record as setting out to make the most accurate musical biopic about The King's illustrious — and ultimately tragic — career. Luhrmann had to be judicious with what he set out to include, and what information to omit from his focus.

Typical_Ranger_1684 thinks that aside from being "inaccurate it tries to present Elvis as someone that did stuff about social issues like civil rights when he never did which is just disrespectful." Elvis may not have been as outspoken as other musicians during the Civil Rights Era, but performing "If I Could Dream" during the '68 Comeback Special was his contribution to the movement and an homage to Dr. Martin Luther King's legacy.

The Movie Was Like A Fever Dream

Given the fact that Luhrmann's movies are well-known for their kaleidoscopic aesthetic, it's not surprising that the same style would be applied to a musical biopic, especially one including one of the most popular entertainers of all time. Moulin Rouge and The Great Gatsby already conveyed that even when dealing with period pieces, Luhrmann often employs a dazzlingly frenetic style of filmmaking.

For some fans like JeanEBH the film just reminds them of "a fever dream" that comes too fast, with a lot of "back and forth, close ups, and having Col Parker creeping around in the background with the snowman topped carnival cane." The majority of fans appreciated the spectacle of the movie, even if they didn't always understand it.

It Was Too Cheesy

Biopics as a genre can sometimes feel manipulative when they explore their central figure through rose-colored glasses, or even feel a bit glib. Elvis had a lot of emotional scenes with depth to them, none of which were intentionally funny, but some fans still found them to be oddly cheesy.

All4monty thought it "reached unintentional comedy status" because it was "extremely cheesy and...Hanks character and acting was goofy af." While Hanks as Colonel Parker has some hammy moments, they're necessary to juxtapose against Butler's intensity.

It Left A Lot Of Things Out

No biopic will be able to explore every aspect of a figure's life, and therefore must jump quickly across eras in a "Greatest Hits" fashion or focus on one period in particular. Many things about Elvis's life the movie didn't show , such as his meeting with President Nixon, would have pulled attention away from more important aspects that serviced the plot.

Darkobscurities thought the movie "took inaccuracy and creative liberties to an extreme. It was absolutely soulless." Given that the movie was made with the blessings and assistance of the Presley estate, it's not surprising that certain aspects of Elvis's life would be downplayed, particularly anything that didn't paint him in a sterling light. Nevertheless, his drug use is not glorified in any way or pushed under the rug.

Its Live Performances Didn't Reflect Real Life

Live performances abound in Elvis , each intending the capture the sheer pandemonium that erupted during an Elvis concert. The screaming crowds might seem inconceivable, but they accurately reflect what happened when the hip-shaking hunk took the stage.

Huntday4 was made very "uncomfortable" by the behavior of the young women from the very first performance scene. "Just feels like another attempt at making an old story 'modern' and 'different'." Actual Elvis footage shows just how frantic the fans could get, some even sobbing uncontrollably in his presence, so if anything, the film isn't trying to compare Elvis to the behavior seen at modern concerts, but show perhaps where that sort of behavior originated.

It Had A Bad Soundtrack

Since Elvis is about one of the most venerated singers of the 20th century, it's soundtrack features a lot of Elvis songs , but it also showcases new talent with original songs as well as remixes and collaborations with The King's material. Some fans didn't think that the soundtrack did justice to Elvis, his music, or the time period.

Paultheschmoop "could’ve done without the 2 or 3 random Elvis remixes with rap verses that completely took me out of the movie." Most fans realize that Luhrmann's choice to include anachronistic songs, particularly for the Beale Street sequences, was to evoke the vibe and energy of the new music coming out at that time that was rebellious and shocking.

Tom Hanks Was Good As Colonel Parker

Most fans feel that with his heavy makeup and prosthetics, as well as his accent of dubious Eastern European origin, Tom Hanks was the weakest part of Elvis. Since the movie was told from his perspective, he was an omniscient presence, but some fans thought he excelled in the role.

To Redditor SweetTeaHasPerks "Tom Hanks was really good." While there can be no doubt Hanks prepared for his role with all the diligence of previous performances, he didn't completely disappear into the role and was seen as more of a distraction than anything else.

It Glossed Over Elvis's Demons

Elvis was as fallible as any one of his fans, and by no means a perfect person. He made mistakes, and the movie shows how his disassociation with his wife Priscilla, constant substance abuse in his later years, and misguided faith in Colonel Parker destroyed many close relationships, a promising career, and his spirit.

And yet, MindfulDisobedience felt that "this biopic lacks Elvis having serious demons. The way they handle the eventuality of him being an overweight alcoholic drug addict is so light to the touch." Considering the latter half of the movie is devoted to his slow, depressing descent into a tragic death after losing everything (and everyone) around him, most fans feel it focused very specifically on his demons.

It Was Too Long And Poorly Edited

Luhrmann movies tend to run long, and at almost two and a half hours in running time, Elvis carries the torch. It also has the signature rapid Luhrmann editing style which, given the length of the movie, actually makes it seem like it flies by.

More_Acanthisitta_73 thinks it was too long and "poorly orchestrated. Too much visual spinning and turning and loud bumping and reminded me of a batman meets circus clown." It's first half is decidedly fast-paced, but it also reflects the excitement of Elvis's rise to stardom, versus the second half that grinds to a laconic crawl, revealing the quagmire Elvis's career has become.

NEXT: 10 Things Fabricated For Baz Luhrmann's Elvis

Elvis Review: A Solid Spectacle

By Jonathan Sim

The King of Rock and Roll has arrived on the big screen. The past few years have given us fictionalized looks at the lives of Freddie Mercury, Elton John, and Aretha Franklin. Now, it’s time for the biggest name in rock and roll to receive his Hollywood treatment in Elvis , a musical drama capturing the life of Elvis Presley from the perspective of his manager, Colonel Tom Parker (Tom Hanks). A two-hour-39-minute epic about a legendary musician is brought to the screen with fascinating results in a grand, well-performed film that can sometimes get too ambitious for its own good.

Baz Luhrmann co-writes and directs this film in a way only he could. Having previously directed films like Moulin Rouge! and The Great Gatsby , Luhrmann brings every bit of those films’ style into Elvis . His overbearing visuals and insane camera movements are what make this film special, with the crash zooms and unique transitions serving as the ultimate mixed bag. Parts of the film are pretty impressive, but others feel like a bewildering attack on the senses, with some overblown moments designed to unnecessarily emphasize dramatic moments.

His directing style elevates what would otherwise be a standard biopic. But does the movie deliver everything that an Elvis biopic should? In some ways, it absolutely does. Portraying a rock star of his caliber is no easy task, and who should the film cast but the guy from Aliens in the Attic , Sharpay’s Fabulous Adventure , and season four of Zoey 101 ? Austin Butler is far from a household name, and he was going up against more established actors such as Miles Teller, Harry Styles, and Aaron Taylor-Johnson. For Hollywood to cast a less bankable actor like him was a risk, and one that paid off in volumes.

Butler is electric. He gives a show-stopping performance as Presley, nailing every single part of the famed musician. His speaking voice, his singing voice, and his dancing all feel like the King of Rock and Roll reincarnated in a star turn for the actor, who channels his role perfectly. His rock-star presence and phenomenal energy make Butler a revelation, and if he wasn’t a household name before, everyone should know his name now. He deserves every bit of praise for all of the preparation that went into taking on this role, and it’s easy to forgive his lack of physical resemblance to Presley with a jaw-dropping performance like this.

Tom Hanks is also impressive in this film. Having spent decades generally playing nice guys and heroes, Hanks takes a more antagonistic turn as Parker, Presley’s manager who had a significant impact on his career. His prosthetics and accent can make this feel like a hammy, over-the-top role, but you truly forget that Hanks is considered one of the nicest men in Hollywood as he sinks his teeth into this character. The casting is excellent across the board, with Olivia DeJonge and Helen Thomson nailing their supporting roles, and a well-cast Chaydon Jay, who plays Elvis as a child and looks the part to a tee.

The movie does an excellent job of illustrating the relationship between Presley and Parker. Where the movie suffers is telling the rest of Presley’s story, with many elements, such as his romantic relationship with Priscilla and his relationship with his mother, getting briefly touched upon and not much more. This rings true when Kacey Musgraves’s cover of “Can’t Help Falling in Love” plays over a romantic scene rather than a scene where Presley could have performed it for his wife. Luhrmann’s style can be the film’s greatest asset and liability, a point that is illustrated perfectly by the strange choice to combine “Hound Dog” with a modern Doja Cat song and play it over a scene set decades in the past.

Elvis works best when Luhrmann taps into his ability to craft an uplifting musical experience. He and Butler perfectly capture the spirit of a Presley concert with the leg dancing and the screaming fans. It’s wild that a 159-minute movie still makes you feel like parts of Presley’s life were rushed through, but it’s a movie that sucks you into a visual style unlike any other. There are many well-edited sequences contrasted by other parts where the directing is distracting. But with an energetic performance from Butler and a distinct filmmaking voice, Elvis will have you humming “Suspicious Minds,” “Trouble,” and “Unchained Melody” long after you’ve left the building.

SCORE : 7/10

As ComingSoon’s review policy explains, a score of 7 equates to “Good.” A successful piece of entertainment that is worth checking out, but it may not appeal to everyone.

Jonathan Sim is a film critic and filmmaker born and raised in New York City. He has met/interviewed some of the leading figures in Hollywood, including Christopher Nolan, Zendaya, Liam Neeson, and Denis Villeneueve. He also works as a screenwriter, director, and producer on independent short films.

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‘Elvis’ Film Review: Baz Luhrmann Gleefully Distorts Legend’s Life in Extravagant Biopic

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This review of “Elvis” was first published May 25, 2022, after its premiere at the Cannes Film Festival.

Can we just admit that if Baz Luhrmann were Elvis, he’d be the Vegas Elvis? Not the lean and feral Early Elvis, or the bored Movie Elvis or the sluggish and bloated Late Elvis. He’d be that early-Vegas Elvis, spangled and prone to excess but also capable of being damned exciting. “If I Can Dream,” “Burning Love” and the epochal “Suspicious Minds” — he’d be that Elvis.

The problem with Luhrmann, though, is one that at times rubs off on Luhrmann’s “Elvis.” The Australian director also has a lot of Colonel Tom Parker in him. Parker was a showman, to be sure, a former carny who managed Elvis and steered him on a path where profit always took precedence over artistry. And as Col. Parker (who was appropriately, neither a colonel nor born with the name Parker) says many times during “Elvis,” “All showmen are snowmen.”

The Colonel was talking about himself, and to a lesser degree Elvis, but Luhrmann knows the snowshoe fits and he wears it proudly. The film is part spirited homage to a titanic force in American music, delivered with the brio and extravagance of Lurhmann riffs like “Moulin Rouge!” and “Romeo + Juliet”; part sad cautionary tale of a quick rise and a long, slow decline; and part showcase for Austin Butler, who takes an impossible role and does a terrific job even though he, like everyone else on the planet, doesn’t really look like Elvis. But at other times the film is also a late-Elvis-sized snow job that gleefully distorts an icon’s life and career.

Also Read: The Definitive ‘Elvis’ Fact Check: What’s True and What’s Fiction in the New Movie?

Of course it does so knowingly and with a wink or two; Luhrmann is not the kind of guy whose films should be scrutinized for historical accuracy. His freewheeling approach is often for the better: At the beginning of “Moulin Rouge!” there’s a thrilling moment when the delirious masses inside the famed Parisian nightspot in 1900 suddenly break into Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” an invigorating statement that Paris at the dawn of the 20th century can be anyplace, anytime.

“Elvis” comes close to that kind of moment a couple of times, most notably when young Elvis watches an old bluesman stomp through a swampy, doomy version of Arthur Crudup’s “That’s All Right” and conflates it with a gospel choir’s supercharged run through “I’ll Fly Away,” in the process creating something like the version of “That’s All Right” that became his first single for Sun Records.

It’s a delirious and invigorating moment, and yet the math is off: Elvis certainly drew from blues and gospel, but the key was that he mixed them with country music, which is almost entirely absent from “Elvis” except as a symbol of the staid old order that Elvis was overturning. So Lurmann’s equation – blues + gospel = Elvis, and by extension rock ‘n’ roll – is too wrong to give the scene the power it might otherwise have.

Granted, “Elvis” isn’t a movie that purports to tell of the birth of rock. For that matter, it doesn’t even begin as a movie about Elvis. The first person we see and the first voice we hear belongs to Tom Hanks’ Col. Parker, who’s just suffered a heart attack and announces that he’s going to tell us the real story of the boy he turned into a star. “Without me,” he says, “there would be no Elvis Presley.”

If this were really Col. Parker telling the story, of course, it’d be far more sanitized and a lot less entertaining, and it certainly wouldn’t immediately launch into a blazing split-screen montage that layers one grandiose moment on top of another. Shot by Mandy Walker with a gloss worthy of The King and designed to the last sequin by Catherine Martin (give her the assignment to create Graceland and stand back!), this is a super-sized, two-hour-and-39-minute extravaganza even if it starts in county fairs and blues shacks in the rural South.

In the Colonel’s telling, Elvis sounded Black but was white, which Parker just knew was the right blend in the sedate-but-waiting-to-explode mid 1950s. He also had the dance moves to shock the white girls who hadn’t seen gyrations like that because they didn’t hang out in juke joints or gospel tents.

“He was a taste of forbidden fruit,” Parker says as he watches one girl collapse into screams. “She could have eaten him whole … It was the greatest carnival attraction I’d ever seen. He was my destiny.”

Also Read: 16 Actors Who Have Played Elvis Presley in TV and Film (Photos)

The canny Colonel is the hero of his telling, but everybody watching “Elvis” will tag him for a huckster from the start. It probably helps that Hanks goes for the strange accent really thick, laying a bit too much groundwork for the moment when we later discover the Colonel’s real provenance.

Basically, the movie’s first stretch is a streamlined rise-of-Elvis sprint that shows just how faithfully Butler can re-create the Elvis moves we’ve seen, and how eagerly Lurhmann can drop in purposeful anachronisms like the rap that suddenly lands in Big Mama Thornton’s version of “Hound Dog.”

In that streamlining there’s a lot of oversimplification, reducing three chaotic years into Elvis hits it big/Elvis offends people with his gyrations and is in danger of being arrested/Colonel Parker sends Elvis into the Army to repair his image. There’s enough energy and flash, though, to overcome most nit-picking, and Butler throws himself into a performance that’s wildly physical but never cartoonish or disrespectful. (The movie respects Presley, who deserves it, but not Parker, who doesn’t.)

Butler was largely unknown when he was cast over reported contenders like Ansel Elgort, Miles Teller, Aaron Taylor-Johnson and Harry Styles, all of whom probably would have brought too much of their own baggage to the role. And it’s not really his fault that he doesn’t look like Elvis, that his singing voice can’t really get close to Elvis and that the makeup, hair styling and wardrobe used to get him in the ballpark mostly makes him look like an Elvis impersonator. (There have been way too many of those over the years for us not to think about that.)

Luhrmann’s cut-and-paste job of covering Elvis’ career falls somewhere between “Bohemian Rhapsody,” which pretended it was telling the real Freddie Mercury story but did nothing of the sort, and “Rocketman,” which told you up front that it was going to turn Elton John’s story into a fantasia. You get the feeling that Luhrmann might have liked to go further in the fantasia direction, but maybe Elvis was too big, too familiar and too sacred for him to go whole hog – so instead he settles for big, charged musical sequences and a host of lies of varying sizes.

Also Read: Austin Butler’s Elvis Presley Is ‘Gonna Do Something Different’ in Latest ‘Elvis’ Trailer (Video)

It’s most egregious, perhaps, in the lengthy sequence that covers the 1968 “comeback” special, when Elvis shrugged off the Colonel’s desire to do a sedate Christmas show and turned in a blistering rock performance that revived his career after more than two dozen terrible movies (and oh, four or five good ones). Not content to tell that story straight, “Elvis” whips up a fictional Hollywood-sign meeting between Elvis and the show’s producer and musical director, drops Bobby Kennedy’s assassination into the middle of the taping (it didn’t happen then) and conjures up a ridiculous moment in which an entire Christmas set is built just to fool Col. Parker.

It’s a shame that Luhrmann and co-writers Sam Bromell, Craig Pearce and Jeremy Doner had to go to those extremes when the reenacted ’68 performances manage to get at some of the power of that show, and when they could have shown Elvis standing up to the Colonel, which he did, a lot more credibly.

The TV special leads to Vegas, and Vegas leads to the long decline, which is treated with some restraint and, again, a lot of narrative streamlining. (But it doesn’t feel like streamlining: The movie runs two hours and 39 minutes, lots of that seemingly occupied by the decline.) In this stretch in particular, it’s hard for Butler to not look as if he’s a guy in an Elvis costume; hell, by about 1975, Elvis looked like a guy in an Elvis costume.

And then, curiously, there he is in one of his final concerts, sweaty and puffy but sitting at the piano and singing a magnificent and heart-rending version of “Unchained Melody.” For a minute, you might watch and think that Butler suddenly looks a lot like late-period Elvis, until you realize that Luhrmann has dropped the artifice and is showing you the real thing. It’s triumphant without the distraction of being an impersonation; it’s pure Elvis at a sad but glorious moment.

The glimpse of the real Elvis in “Elvis” is eventually followed by some exhilarating end-credits music, a mashup of remixes, covers and raps over Elvis tracks that captures a lot of what the movie aspires to, and achieves at times.

Also Read: Priscilla Presley Gives Austin Butler’s Elvis Her Seal of Approval: ‘Wow!!! Bravo to Him’

As for the moments that don’t work – well, back in “Jailhouse Rock” in 1957, there’s a signature (and from this remove, cringeworthy) scene where Elvis’ character forcibly kisses a music promoter played by Judy Tyler. “How dare you think such cheap tactics would work with me,” she snaps. “That ain’t tactics, honey,” Elvis says. “It’s just the beast in me.”

So maybe the thing to do is to go along with the extravagant pleasures of “Elvis,” and ignore the silliness. After all, it’s just the beast – or, more accurately, the snowman – in Baz.

Elvis opens Friday in U.S. theaters nationwide.

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Watching ‘Elvis’ feels like being in a washing machine for 2 ½ hours

Baz luhrmann’s jumbled biopic of the king is audacious, frenetic, occasionally astonishing and ultimately confounding.

The best way to appreciate “Elvis,” Baz Luhrmann’s audacious, frenetic, occasionally astonishing and ultimately confounding movie about Elvis Presley, is simply to surrender to it. Luhrmann, best known for such kaleidoscopic fantasias as “ Romeo and Juliet ” and “ Moulin Rouge! ,” possesses just enough hubris to believe himself capable of re-creating the lightning that Elvis Presley embodied, and that continued to make him a pop culture icon decades after his 1977 death. With “Elvis,” Luhrmann matches Presley’s drive and instinctive charisma and raises him for sheer nerve, simultaneously hewing to the hoariest conventions of Hollywood rise-and-fall biopics and seeking to gleefully subvert them at every turn.

Should Elvis’s legacy live on?

The result is a dizzying, almost hallucinatory experience — akin to being thrown into a washing machine and mercilessly churned for 2 ½ hours. That isn’t to say that “Elvis” doesn’t provide moments of insight, or even genuine inspiration; it’s just that they occur fitfully, when the viewer is briefly pasted up against the window before being plunged into the barrel of Luhrmann’s lurid sensibility once again.

The most interesting conceit of “Elvis,” which Luhrmann co-wrote with Sam Bromell, Craig Pearce and Jeremy Doner, also happens to be its biggest weakness: The story of Presley’s life is narrated by his manager, Col. Tom Parker, played by Tom Hanks behind layers of prosthetics and a heavy Dutch accent. (Born in the Netherlands, Andreas van Kuijk took the name “Tom Parker” upon enlisting in the U.S. Army in 1929. The honorary “colonel” came later, in return for his help with the campaign of Louisiana Gov. Jimmie Davis.) Jovial, conniving and defiantly amoral, Parker makes for a sulfurous and, frankly, tiresome guide through Presley’s life story, which Luhrmann illustrates with a bricolage of musical numbers, set pieces and melodramatic encounters, at one point throwing in an animated sequence taken from the comic books Elvis read as a child. During his formative years, young Elvis (Chaydon Jay) watches transfixed as African American patrons of a Tupelo juke joint writhe deliriously to Arthur “Big Boy” Crudup, then runs to a nearby Pentecostal revival tent where he’s just as mesmerized by the preaching of the word. Luhrmann intercuts the scenes with jacked-up intensity, framing Presley’s love for Black music and culture as seduction and spiritual conversion. (Crudup is played by Gary Clark Jr. Presley’s friends and influences B.B. King, Sister Rosetta Tharpe, Big Mama Thornton and Little Richard are played by Kelvin Harrison Jr., Yola, Shonka Dukureh and Alton Mason, respectively, in picture postcard-tinted scenes of Beale Street club life.)

It’s a blunt, unsubtle but also thrilling scene whose momentum is oddly stopped cold by a cut to Presley — now portrayed by Austin Butler — performing at the Louisiana Hayride in 1954. As the Colonel explains in his ever-present, self-justifying narration, the Black voice in a White body, combined with Presley’s distinctive stage presence — the nervously wiggling leg; the fey, almost feminine beauty; the otherworldly embodiment of the carnal and the sanctified — made Presley “the greatest carnival act I’d ever seen.”

The narrative arc of “Elvis” often feels like it’s been lifted of a piece from Guillermo del Toro’s recent adaptation of “Nightmare Alley.” Parker, a carnival worker whose showmanship and talent for the short con earned him the nickname “The Snowman,” is portrayed as an Iago-like schemer who sees Presley as the ultimate geek, ripe for exploitation. “Elvis” is aware that the audience knows exactly where this is all going: In rapid succession, using dramatized and real-life news clips, Luhrmann revisits the highs, lows and most dismal depths of Presley’s life, including his sudden stardom, the ensuing furor over his sexuality and “race mixing,” his stint in the Army, his marriage to Priscilla (Olivia DeJonge), his movie career, his decline during the British Invasion, his 1968 comeback special, his residency in Las Vegas, and his descent into drug addiction and exhaustion. Luhrmann reenacts it all with fealty overlaid with funhouse overstatement, an approach that starts to feel as stifling as Parker’s merchandising gimmicks.

Just as Parker took 50 percent of Presley’s earnings, he commandeers at least half the movie, butting into the story with glint-eyed asides and oppressive voice-overs. Luhrmann takes some admirable risks in “Elvis,” including the use of present-day covers of Presley hits by the likes of Doja Cat, Kacey Musgraves and Jack White, but nearly every choice he makes has the effect of disorienting and distancing audiences rather than immersing them.

To paraphrase the title of Todd Haynes’s Bob Dylan movie, which used similar techniques to more intriguing and meaningful effect: The problem with “Elvis” is that he’s not there. Luhrmann is moving so fast, with such mannered, overbearing self-consciousness, that Butler can barely get a hip swivel in edgewise, let alone a fully realized characterization. He does his own singing during Presley’s formative years, and he does an admirable job of capturing the intoxication and terror of his nascent stardom. But he’s being put through the paces by a filmmaker who turns out to be just as controlling as Parker himself.

It’s tempting to theorize that Luhrmann is temperamentally more attracted to Parker as a protagonist because he sees a fellow martinet, but the Colonel is really the lens through which the filmmaker is examining a broader theme: the freak show of fandom. Continually thwarted from giving his character anything resembling an inner life, Butler’s Presley threatens to get lost in an engulfing spectacle of bloat, sweat and adoring girls’ tears. But something uncanny happens once Parker installs him at the International Hotel in Las Vegas. By now, Butler is lip-syncing to Presley’s actual vocals. But his embodiment of the character has reached another level, where every secret smile and bit of swagger feels like it’s being channeled rather than performed. Karate-chopping and chomp-chomping his way through “Suspicious Minds” and “Polk Salad Annie,” Butler turns what could have been yet another impression of the most imitated musician of all time into something authentic and unexpectedly powerful.

Then it’s back into Luhrmann’s tumbling barrel. Vegas, of course, marks the beginning of the end in “Elvis,” which concludes with Presley himself singing “Unchained Melody” soon before his death. It’s a haunting coda: sad and soaring, tragic and eerily timeless. And it inadvertently suggests that the preceding movie was a sideshow all along. There was always going to be only one Elvis, and he’s long since left the building.

PG-13. At area theaters. Contains substance abuse, strong language, suggestive material and smoking. 159 minutes.

Fact checking the new 'Elvis' movie: Did he really fire Colonel Tom Parker onstage in Las Vegas?

Spoiler alert! The following discusses plot points from the new "Elvis" movie and the real life of Elvis Presley . Stop reading if you haven't seen it yet and don't want to know.

The epic biopic “Elvis” covers a lot of ground – 42 years, to be precise – from the iconic singer’s birth until his death in 1977.

Given the inevitable event compression required of any movie looking to cover decades in hours, one wonders just how much of “Elvis” really happened to Elvis Presley ?

From director Baz Luhrmann’s research in Memphis and Elvis’ birthplace of Tupelo, Mississippi, to scores of well-researched biographies, there is laudable accuracy to the film, which is streaming and on demand now ( HBO Max , Amazon Prime , Apple TV , Vudu , Google Play and other platforms). Also credit star Austin Butler's studious depiction of the King of Rock 'n' Roll.

But we identified six moments in “Elvis” that made us scratch our heads. Just how true are they? For answers, we enlisted expert Alanna Nash, the author of several Elvis books (including “The Colonel: The Extraordinary Story of Colonel Tom Parker and Elvis Presley” and “Baby, Let’s Play House: Elvis Presley and the Women Who Loved Him”).

Lisa Marie Presley dies: The only child of Elvis dies at 54 after a brief hospitalization

Did B.B. King and Elvis Presley really hang out together on Beale Street?

King, who worked as a DJ in Memphis at the time, would certainly have been aware of Elvis, and vice versa, but they would not have been hanging out and catching acts such as Little Richard as the movie portrays, says Nash.

“Elvis and B.B. were acquaintances, but not close friends," she says. "They probably first crossed paths at Sun Studio, but only briefly."

There was an encounter in December 1956, when King was the headliner on the all-black WDIA Goodwill Revue. Elvis was asked to perform, but his contract wouldn’t allow it, Nash says.

But toward the end of the evening, DJ Rufus Thomas brought Elvis out for a “leg gyration and the crowd went wild.” Backstage, King and Presley posed together for a picture.

'I couldn't be an imposter': How Austin Butler vanished into the role of Elvis Presley

Was Robert F. Kennedy killed while Elvis was taping the ’68 Comeback Special?

The senator was shot elsewhere in Los Angeles, andnot during the taping of that iconic Elvis TV special but during rehearsals, Nash says.

“Elvis arrived for the start of two weeks of rehearsals on June 3, 1968, and Kennedy was shot on June 5, dying the next morning, June 6,” she says. “The assassination put Elvis into an emotional spiral.”

The tailspin created by RFK’s death led directly to the special’s powerful finale. Show director/producer Steve Binder turned to songwriter Earl Brown to write an emotional ballad , "If I Can Dream," that reflected Elvis’ hopes that the nation could get through such a crisis and heal.

“Interestingly, Elvis didn’t immediately jump on it,” Nash says. “He thought it might be a little too Broadway. He said, ‘Let me hear it again,’ and it was only after he heard it seven or eight times that he said, ‘OK, I’ll do it.’ "

Review: Austin Butler rules as the King, but Baz Luhrmann's 'Elvis' is an unchained mess of a movie

Did Colonel Tom Parker convince Elvis to play Las Vegas to settle Parker's gambling debts?

The connection isn't nearly as direct as the film implies, which presents Elvis’ residency at the International Hotel as a way for Elvis' manager to settle his sizable gambling debts at the hotel's casino.

Nash notes that Parker ( played in the film by Tom Hanks ) was an inveterate gambler dating back to his early years in the carnival business, often decamping for Hot Springs, Arkansas, or Palm Springs, California, to satisfy his needs. Once he experienced Las Vegas, that became a frequent stop for the promoter.

That isn’t to say that Parker’s gambling and Elvis’ Vegas shows aren't linked, she says. The colonel was said to be worth $1 million a year to the International because of his gambling, according to onetime International executive Alex Shoofey, Nash says.

“The rumor floated around town that Milton Prell, Shoofey’s old boss at the Sahara, had brokered the (Elvis) deal for the colonel, getting money from the mob to put the deal together," Nash says. "Mob involvement is suggested in the film."

'Where has this been hiding?': Tom Hanks changed his mind about his favorite Elvis song

Did Elvis go into the Army to avoid being jailed for indecency?

Not true, Nash says.

“The colonel was delighted that Elvis was causing riots and grabbing headlines for being overly suggestive,” she says. “It’s part of why he wanted him in the first place. Parker, ever the carny, knew what brought people in the big tent.”

After Elvis was drafted, Parker – whom Nash notes was an Army deserter – worked with the Pentagon to ensure he'd be a regular soldier and not in the entertainment corps.

“He negotiated it as a PR move to make him appear to be the all-American boy,” she says.

Interestingly, when Elvis was stationed in Germany, he met future General Colin Powell, a lieutenant at the time.

Nash says Powell told her that he and Presley were out “in a field in the woods in Germany, and he just looked like every other pimple-faced (soldier), doing what other soldiers were doing and trying to get along. He properly saluted and sir’d me left and right, and I always admired that in him.”

Austin Butler as Elvis: His acting lessons began when Tom Hanks delivered a typewriter to his door

Did Elvis actually fire the colonel from the stage in Las Vegas?

“No, he never would have done that,” Nash says. Nor did he ever suggest onstage that he knew of the colonel’s immigration issues.

“He fully believed the colonel’s story that Parker hailed from Huntington, West Virginia; Elvis died not knowing the truth," she says. "That didn’t come out in this country until 1981."

However, she adds, there was an incident a few years before his death when Elvis exploded at Hilton owner Barron Hilton. Elvis had gone to the home of an employee he liked, whose wife was dying from cancer, and Hilton terminated the employee because of a rule banning any contact between employees and hotel talent.

That night from the stage, Elvis delivered a furious attack on Hilton, saying he “wasn’t worth a damn,” she says. Parker was livid. The two argued into the night until Elvis, in his 30th-floor suite, fired Parker, who immediately replied that he quit and, as the movie depicts, “retired to his offices to draw up a bill” for what he claimed Elvis owed him.

The sum varies from $2 million to $10 million, she says, and as the movie shows, Elvis ultimately decided he couldn’t afford to pay and went back to work for the colonel.

Did Priscilla Presley really arrange for Elvis to go into rehab?

No, Nash says.

“She says in her book ‘Elvis and Me’ that she would occasionally hear that he had checked into the hospital, and that she would then call to see if he was all right,” Nash says.

In another one book, “Elvis by the Presleys,” Priscilla Presley says many asked her why she didn’t initiate an intervention.

Her response: “People who ask that don’t know Elvis. Elvis would no more have responded to an intervention than a demand to give up singing. … He would have undoubtedly laughed away any attempt at an intervention. There’s no one, including his father, who could have pulled that off.”

By the time Elvis was trying to get help for his addictions, his ex-wife was no longer in his life on a daily basis. Adds Nash: “Priscilla was not as involved with Elvis after their divorce as she would now have people believe.”

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Crew chief says Judge should have been called for interference on slide during Yankees’ rally

Milwaukee Brewers manager Pat Murphy argues a call during the sixth inning of a baseball game against the New York Yankees Sunday, April 28, 2024, in Milwaukee. (AP Photo/Morry Gash)

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MILWAUKEE (AP) — Aaron Judge should have been called for interference for his slide on a botched double-play attempt that sparked New York’s winning rally Sunday at Milwaukee, crew chief Andy Fletcher acknowledged after the Yankees’ 15-5 victory .

With the score tied 4-all in the sixth inning, Judge raised his left arm while sliding into second base after Alex Verdugo hit a bouncer to the right side of the infield. Brewers shortstop Willy Adames was attempting to complete the double play when his throw bounced off Judge’s padded hand and landed on the ground, enabling Verdugo to reach safely.

The Yankees went on to score seven runs in the inning, all with two outs.

“On the field, we got together and did the best that we could to come up with the correct answer,” Fletcher told a pool reporter after the game. “After looking at it off the field in replay, it appears that the call was missed. It should’ve been called interference because it wasn’t a natural part of his slide. It didn’t appear that way to us. We did everything we could to get together and get it right. But after looking at it, it appears that it should’ve been called interference.”

Fletcher noted the call isn’t reviewable.

Los Angeles Dodgers' Will Smith crosses the plate after hitting a solo home run during the sixth inning of a baseball game against the Arizona Diamondbacks, Monday, April 29, 2024, in Phoenix. (AP Photo/Matt York)

Judge said he had no worries about getting called for interference even as the crew gathered to discuss the play.

“No, that’s never happened before in my life, and I’ve been sliding like that for years,” Judge said.

Brewers manager Pat Murphy had come out of the dugout to argue for an interference call. He continued pleading his case while speaking to reporters after the game.

“It’s hard to say that he wasn’t making an attempt at least purposely to obstruct,” Murphy said. “I don’t think he wanted to get hit by the ball, but I think he was trying to purposely obstruct. That’s my opinion. I don’t know what his intent was. He seems like a wonderful man, but very competitive also.”

Adames noted how Judge’s 6-foot-7 frame made it particularly difficult to attempt a throw to first.

“He’s like 7 feet tall,” Adames said. “He’s huge. I think when he puts his hands up, he’s taller than me even when he’s sliding to second base. It’s a tough space for me to throw the ball.”

Judge reached on a leadoff walk before Verdugo hit his bouncer to second baseman Brice Turang, who threw to Adames to retire Judge at second. As Judge raised his left arm on his slide to second, he was wearing a sliding glove on his hand. Judge, who said the throw hit him on the side of his fingers, noted he frequently slides that way.

“You can look back at any picture you want of me sliding into second base,” Judge said. “That’s always happened.”

It appeared the lack of an interference call wouldn’t make much of a difference in Sunday’s outcome after Abner Uribe retired Giancarlo Stanton on a pop fly for the second out of the inning. But everything fell apart for the Brewers from that point on.

Verdugo advanced on Anthony Rizzo’s walk and scored the go-ahead run on Gleyber Torres’ single to center. Oswaldo Cabrera walked to load the bases before Jose Trevino singled home two runs. Elvis Peguero replaced Uribe and threw a wild pitch that brought home Cabrera. After Anthony Volpe walked, Juan Soto hit an RBI single.

Volpe and Soto executed a double steal while Judge was at the plate receiving a chorus of boos from the American Family Field crowd. Judge capped the seven-run outburst with a two-run single that extended the Yankees’ lead to 11-4.

The Brewers never recovered from the missed call.

“They admitted they messed up,” Adames said. “We mess up sometimes. That’s how it goes sometimes.”

AP MLB: https://apnews.com/hub/mlb

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Click here to see the rankings for every poll done. Summary: From his childhood in Tupelo, Mississippi to his rise to stardom starting in Memphis, Tennessee and his conquering of Las Vegas, Nevada, Elvis Presley becomes the first rock 'n roll star and changes the world with his music. Director: Baz Luhrmann. Writers:
Baz Luhrmann's 'Elvis' Review Thread : r/boxoffice
82%. 11. 6.70/10. Metacritic: 60 (12 Reviews) Sample Reviews: A fizzy, delirious, impishly energized, compulsively watchable 2-hour-and-39-minute fever dream -- a spangly pinwheel of a movie that converts the Elvis saga we all carry around in our heads into a lavishly staged biopic-as-pop-opera.
"Elvis" review megathread : r/Elvis
The Times: Baz Luhrmann's best movie since Romeo + Juliet. The Telegraph: can't help falling in love with Baz Luhrmann's jukebox epic. IGN: Baz Luhrmann's Elvis is a dizzying and at times even overwhelming chronicle of the rock icon. Austin Butler is stellar as Elvis, giving it his absolute all in every scene; truly, a star is born here.
A Comprehensive Review for Elvis. Let's Discuss! : r/TrueFilm
Elvis is an intelligent and engaging history lesson, a fine film to showcase style (both Luhrmann's and Presley's) and a mostly inadequate, unsatisfying dive into the inner psychology of the eponymous man. It's all exterior, which is fine, and absolutely entertaining, but none too enlightening. It's a well distilled recollection of an ...
Watching "Elvis" : r/movies
The goal of /r/Movies is to provide an inclusive place for discussions and news about films with major releases. Submissions should be for the purpose of informing or initiating a discussion, not just to entertain readers.
The Elvis movie reviews : r/Elvis
You're right!!! "Major outlet, Smajor outlet". 3. Kardospi. • 1 yr. ago. This movie is hot garbage. Putting contemporary music in a biopic about Elvis is jarring and unwelcomed to say the least. It portrays people and places incorrectly on purpose to paint Elvis and his family in a terrible light. 2.
How did Elvis get such high ratings and good reviews?
The movies failure is that Elvis isn't the main character and the movie isn't interested in Elvis the person or Elvis the musician. It's only interested in Elvis the cultural sensation. The movie is so obsessed with col tom Parker that Elvis barely gets any in depth scenes and is left to exposition dialogue.
Elvis movie review & film summary (2022)
Elvis. "Elvis" brings all of the glitz, rhinestones, and jumpsuits you'd expect in an Elvis film, but without the necessary complexity for a movie from 2022 about the "King.". Maximalist filmmaker Baz Luhrmann, who abhors visual restraint and instead opts for grand theatricality, should be the perfect creator for a Presley biopic, but ...
Review: Austin Butler, Baz Luhrmann deliver a grand 'Elvis'
It is as though the wildness of all of Luhrmann's films is bursting out of Butler's Elvis, through his hip thrusts and sweat and that booming, beautiful voice. "Elvis," a Warner Bros. release in theaters Friday, is rated PG-13 by the Motion Picture Association for "substance abuse, strong language, suggestive material and smoking.".
'Elvis' Review: Shocking the King Back to Life
Graceland is a pilgrimage spot and a mausoleum. Baz Luhrmann's "Elvis" — a biopic in the sense that "Heartbreak Hotel" is a Yelp review — works mightily to dispel this funerary gloom ...
Has anyone seen the new Elvis movie, if so is it any good?
If you like Elvis Presley you'll probably enjoy it, it's more story-heavy than a musical. I just saw it. I loved the trailer, too, and in general I like Baz Luhrmann's work. Austin Butler is incredible in it and ofc, the music is great. But it plays like a musical theater production of a Wikipedia page.
'Elvis' Review: Austin Butler & Tom Hanks in Baz Luhrmann's Biopic
Director: Baz Luhrmann. Rated PG-13, 2 hours 39 minutes. As for the big question of whether Butler could pull off impersonating one of the most indelible icons in American pop-culture history, the ...
Elvis Review: Baz Luhrmann's Delirious Biopic Is Bohemian ...
Warner Bros. releases the film in theaters on Friday, June 24. "It doesn't matter if you do 10 stupid things so long as you do one smart one," Colonel Tom Parker advises us near the start of ...
Elvis review
"Without me there would be no Elvis Presley," drawls Tom Hanks's Colonel Tom Parker (aka Dutchman Andreas Cornelis van Kuijk), a "snowman" or carnival huckster who does his deals on a ...
Elvis
Sep 8, 2023. Rated: 3/5 • Jul 31, 2023. Jul 26, 2023. The film explores the life and music of Elvis Presley (Austin Butler), seen through the prism of his complicated relationship with his ...
Elvis movie review: Baz Luhrmann's sweaty, seductive biopic makes the
Parker, who saw early promise in Elvis's politically radical blend of country and R'n'B, slyly positioned himself as the sole overseer of the star's creative enterprise - the man who won ...
10 Unpopular Opinions About The Elvis Movie, According To Reddit
Most fans feel that with his heavy makeup and prosthetics, as well as his accent of dubious Eastern European origin, Tom Hanks was the weakest part of Elvis. Since the movie was told from his perspective, he was an omniscient presence, but some fans thought he excelled in the role. To Redditor SweetTeaHasPerks "Tom Hanks was really good."
Elvis Review: A Solid Spectacle
Elvis works best when Luhrmann taps into his ability to craft an uplifting musical experience. He and Butler perfectly capture the spirit of a Presley concert with the leg dancing and the ...
'Elvis' Film Review: Baz Luhrmann Gleefully Distorts Legend ...
This review of "Elvis" was first published May 25, 2022, after its premiere at the Cannes Film Festival. were Elvis, he'd be the Vegas Elvis? Not the lean and feral Early Elvis, or the bored ...
Baz Luhrmann's 'Elvis' is a disorienting jumble
Austin Butler stars as Elvis Presley in Baz Luhrmann's musical film "Elvis," which dramatizes the singer's life and career. (Video: Warner Bros.) 6 min. ( 1.5 stars) The best way to appreciate ...
'Elvis' movie review: Austin Butler rules as King over musical mess
After the movie's fever-dreamy first half, Luhrmann puts on the brakes from that breakneck pace as he reaches the late 1960s. After Elvis' foray into Hollywood, he and Parker land in Las Vegas ...
Elvis 4K Blu-ray Review
The track is a hugely musical affair, and its mix beautifully captures the energy and vitality of those many live musical performances. We reviewed the region free UK Ultra HD Blu-ray release of Elvis on a Denon AVR-X4300H and a 7.2.4 array of KEF speakers (including the Q range and ci in-walls/in-ceilings). Home AV Review.
'Elvis' movie fact check: What's true, what's fiction in new biopic?
Elvis had gone to the home of an employee he liked, whose wife was dying from cancer, and Hilton terminated the employee because of a rule banning any contact between employees and hotel talent ...
Crew chief says Judge should have been called for interference on slide
MILWAUKEE (AP) — Aaron Judge should have been called for interference for his slide on a botched double-play attempt that sparked New York's winning rally Sunday at Milwaukee, crew chief Andy Fletcher acknowledged after the Yankees' 15-5 victory. With the score tied 4-all in the sixth inning, Judge raised his left arm while sliding into second base after Alex Verdugo hit a bouncer to the ...