Here's what the press took from Elvis and Nixon aka Ugly Elvis
Here's what the press took away from Ugly Elvis,
Elvis was traveling with some guns and his collection of police badges, and he decided that what he really wanted was a badge from the federal Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs back in Washington. "The narc badge represented some kind of ultimate power to him," Priscilla Presley would write in her memoir, Elvis and Me. "With the federal narcotics badge, he [believed he] could legally enter any country both wearing guns and carrying any drugs he wished."
Arrayed in a purple velvet suit with a huge gold belt buckle and amber sunglasses, Elvis came bearing a gift—a Colt .45 pistol mounted in a display case that Elvis had plucked off the wall of his Los Angeles mansion.
In 1988, years after Nixon resigned and Elvis died of a drug overdose, a Chicago newspaper reported that the National Archives was selling photos of the meeting, and within a week, some 8,000 people requested copies, making the pictures the most requested photographs in Archives history.
Smithsonian Magazine
Michael Shannon, an actor whose intensity level rarely falls below 11, inhabits Elvis with a sensitivity that belies the polyester dazzle and piled-on wigginess of his wardrobe. His Elvis is arrogant, oblivious, and more than a little bit silly, but strikingly lonely and vulnerable too: A sideburned bird in a cage who longs to do good for his country and save what he deems a degenerate generation of stoned hippies and would-be communists from themselves.
Elvis & Nixon isn’t much.
Entertainment Weekly
We get a bit of insight into Elvis' feelings of alienation and despair, but there's not enough of it to make this film's Elvis seem like more than an underdeveloped vehicle for social satire and bleak psychological comedy. By the 1970s, Elvis' movie career was dead, his country-gospel recordings hadn't caught on with younger fans who were enamored with the Beatles and the Stones and Jimi Hendrix and other psychedelically-flavored rockers, and he'd failed to capitalize on the success of his "Elvis '68" TV special, which a lot of people thought would signal a powerful new phase in his career. The Elvis we meet here carries himself like a defeated man. He plays casino shows for die-hard fans and frets that he's become a cartoon version of himself.
ON UGLY ELVIS - Watch the way he inclines his head, the way he punctuates his statements with finger-snaps and karate moves and hand-waves that suggest a priestly blessing (or a Jedi master trying to halt an enemy in his tracks). He pitches his voice higher than a typical impersonator would, a choice that makes you think of Elvis as an overgrown Little Boy.
Roger Ebert
The King imagined himself going undercover to combat America’s rising drug problem in his spare time (or, as Priscilla Presley’s memoir later revealed, passing freely across borders with as much narcotics as he pleased).
In those days, Elvis was almost distractingly pretty — a far cry from Shannon’s lurching scarecrow look.
Though the presidential aides have expressly advised him not to touch Nixon’s candy dish or personal Dr. Pepper bottle, Elvis breezes into the Oval Office, rudely opting not to remove his oversized aviator glasses, before plopping down on the couch and helping himself to all the President’s M&M’s.
He may not have manners, but the King clearly has control of the situation, and though it wasn’t so common to have entertainers grace the White House, a mere decade later, a former B-movie actor would be sitting in Nixon’s chair.
Variety
Shannon makes no physical sense as Elvis Presley, even when wearing the familiar royal armor — the rings flashing like gold-plated brass knuckles, the sculptured hair, the cute revolver strapped to a pale ankle. The casting feels so incongruous that it’s distracting.
As Elvis, Mr. Shannon doesn’t deliver a performance that’s a triumph of technical virtuosity along the lines of Meryl Streep’s eerie reanimation of Julia Child in “Julie & Julia”; it isn’t even a halfway decent Elvis impersonation. It is instead a performance of stardom by an actor whose own magnetism trumps every objection, much as the real Presley transcends every jibe, jumpsuit and downward turn.
By the time Kevin Spacey scuttles in as Nixon, all hunched shoulders and crablike motion, you have spent too much time watching the filmmakers pad the movie, including via Elvis’s dull friend Jerry (Alex Pettyfer).
NY TIMES
Though Shannon looks little like Presley, he fits comfortably into the flamboyant costumes and the increasingly bizarre behavior Elvis exhibited in the years before his 1977 death.
Elvis, no stranger to drugs in real life, wants to be named a “federal agent at large” for what was then known as the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs, bizarrely imagining he could go undercover.
Elvis, no stranger to drugs in real life, wants to be named a “federal agent at large” for what was then known as the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs, bizarrely imagining he could go undercover.
NY Post
Elvis & Nixon spends most of its time with Presley, who may actually be the more inscrutable of the two. He impulsively decides he needs to become an undercover narcotics agent, an epiphany he commemorates by — what else? — shooting out the screen of a TV. Its offense? Showing him the face of Timothy Leary, guru of the psychedelic age that had eclipsed good old rock'n'roll.
Shot principally in Louisiana on a modest budget, Elvis & Nixon doesn't attempt to reconstruct the story's actual milieu. (There's also, unsurprisingly, no Elvis music.) Washington and LAX in 1970 are suggested with brief archival clips, and most of the scenes set outside the Oval Office or Presley's hotel suite are unconvincing. The movie would be better without the singer's visit to a D.C. donut shop and his airport encounter with an Elvis impersonator.
NPR
This is Elvis as he might exist — still — in a parallel universe, one where he calls the shots instead of the Colonel and where a wacked-out rock star can be a switchblade of energy rather than an indolent wreck.
And this Elvis is whacked-out indeed.
The movie’s genial but surprisingly small potatoes, and it’s telling that there’s none of Presley’s music to be heard in it.
Boston Globe
Elvis, a longtime fancier of guns and badges, had the crackpot notion that he should be appointed to the nonexistent post of federal agent-at-large. His stated goal was to be of service to his country by infiltrating the counterculture to help stamp out the nation’s growing drug problem and communist threat. In her autobiography, Elvis and Me, his wife Priscilla Presley offers an alternative scenario: The badge would allow him to legally cross any border wearing guns and carrying drugs. Whatever the reason, it was something Elvis desired immensely, and launched this crazy Christmastime escapade.
Austin Chronicle
Shannon in particular has a way of carrying his body and gesturing with his hands that possess a superstar’s bizarre, borderline entitled aura.
Johnson includes a scene of Presley rehearsing for his presidential chat by talking to himself about his stillborn twin.
Hanks can’t help but do an Elvis impression when reading the singer’s letter to the president aloud, but the details don’t accumulate into real substance.
Elvis & Nixon is basically a diverting TV movie given a theatrical release.
AV Club
Shannon's Elvis is an intriguing figure, keenly aware of the division between his own personality and the character he plays in the American landscape. Stubbornly willful and insulated from common experience, he's a lonely guy driven by ego and impulse. He can't resist slipping into self-parody ("thankyouverymuch" is staple dialogue), but he also understands the power and currency of his fame. Law agencies over the years have humored him with honorary deputy badges, and he sets his sights on a federal badge. (Priscilla Presley believes the federal badge was all about being able to travel freely with guns and drugs, a notion the film only vaguely flirts with entertaining.)
Alex Pettyfer earns sympathy in his portrayal of Jerry Schilling, which is softly remarkable given his previous work; and Johnny Knoxville capers as Sonny, another in Presley's coterie. These two roles pull the film in bad directions.
The story notes leading up to those situations are little more than cartoonish exercises in wheel-spinning. In a sense, Shannon and Spacey might as well be playing Road Runner and Coyote, chasing one another around the Oval Office, laying traps and countermeasures, ultimately getting nowhere despite all their efforts, and taking us with them.
Indiewire
As the landmark first movie acquired by Amazon Studios, Elvis & Nixon is set to follow its theatrical release with an exclusive digital debut on their streaming video service. And I believe it will be free for Prime members. As a complete movie, it’s too botched to fully recommend, but there are a few parts that are worth checking out when it hits Amazon if you’re really curious about the story or are a completist when it comes to witnessing all of the many portrayals of both Elvis and Nixon. Just skim over much of it, especially any scene featuring Pettyfer.
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There's tons more and it's very sad. The last points out that this is a first feature film for Amazon. That's a common thing. CMT launched it's first scripted shows both featuring Elvis. And AXS channel is doing it's first movie about if Elvis was still alive by the people who did Sharknando. Elvis sells, folks! And we can not ALLOW them to do this to Elvis while using him to make their companies legit.
More article reviews will be added. I am so sad for Elvis. This just breaks my heart.
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