Here’s my “Quick and Dirty Review” of “Elvis.”
Elvis is your standard — and awesome — Baz Luhrmann color-fest, filled to the brim with so much stuff to see that you kinda get lost along the way and forget that this movie is about one of the most famous celebrities in history. And it throws you for a loop — while ostensibly being about Elvis (an excellent Austin Butler), obviously, it’s also very much about Colonel Tom Parker (Tom Hanks in a fat suit), the controversial manager and promoter to the pop star and a man who “managed” the career of Elvis from the beginning.
Baz Luhrmann recreates many of the the pop icon’s biggest moments, but the pacing of the film made me feel like it never really got going. You know how they do those “previously on” montages before the “real” story gets going? This whole movie was cut like a “previously on” segment, and I was twenty minutes in before I figured out they were not setting something but up — that was just the style of the film.
The pacing is frenetic and, at times, hard to follow. And while that makes for flashy filmmaking, it greatly reduces the emotional impact of what the filmmaker is trying to do. 7 out of 10, good effort.
