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Elvis Movie Review

Elvis is a 2022 biographical drama film directed by Baz Luhrmann and starring Austin Butler and Tom Hanks. It’s a mediocre biopic that is problematic in so many areas.

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“The way you sing is God-given,

so there can’t be nothin’ wrong with it“

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It follows the rise and fall of Elvis Presley, told from the perspective of his manager, Colonel Tom Parker. And right there is where we encounter an issue. Why would you tell an Elvis story and have it be narrated by his manager? Not only that, but why would the manager be the focal point of this entire movie? And why would you paint him in such a villainous light and then still have him narrate your movie? These are all the questions that should be directed to Baz Luhrmann, the man who directed this pointless mess of a film.

This Tom Parker character simply does not work. Because the movie is narrated by him, they never really set on the right tone in regards to his story and his characterization. But the main reason why the character simply failed to ignite stems from Tom Hanks’ acting. He is a great actor of course, but this was not among his stronger works. In fact, I’ve never seen him be as bad as he was here.

Hanks was rarely great at villainous roles and here he was just not well cast. There were so many other actors that would have played him much better. The prosthetic work done on him was distracting as well. As for that accent, it was atrocious. It’s supposed to mimic a Dutch immigrant accent, but it sounded like a caricaturist German accent that Hanks dropped in and out of in every subsequent sequence. It’s just a terrible performance all-around.

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Before Elvis, I wasn’t acquainted with Austin Butler. Seeing him here, I have to say that he looks and sounds the part. In fact, he is eerily similar to the real guy that it was downright creepy at times. Unlike Hanks, this was the case of excellent casting and he was terrific in the role. It’s a shame that this character also did not work.

The movie focused so extensively on the Coronel character that Elvis himself was both underutilized and ridiculously underdeveloped. We never get to see why he clicked for so many people and why he was a genuine star. We never see him creating music, but just performing it in very well executed musical sequences, but those sections felt oddly misplaced and tacked in to the movie that failed to properly contextualize any of the songs.

Elvis just felt like an alien and an afterthought in his own movie. We only get a couple of his all-time classic songs as the rest of the picture focuses on his more forgettable and lesser-known works for some unbeknownst reason to me. The writers also added the theme of race relations to the proceedings and it was tackled in such an unsubtle manner that a couple of lines of dialogue were downright laughable.

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They were so afraid of the angry Twitter and TikTok mob that they desperately tried to convince audiences that he was a good guy after all. That desperation reeked from every single sequence in a film that is also hopelessly chaotic and loud in style, sound and editing that it resembled all the worst qualities of Baz Luhrmann without a purposeful vision to guide all of that chaos into any possible meaning. It’s also self-indulgent how long it is. Some of the scenes are emotionally effective, but most of it was utterly dull and frustratingly misguided.