Seen That? Watch This is a weekly column from critic Luke Buckmaster, taking a new release and matching it to comparable works. This week, Agent Elvis leads him to revisit three movies featuring weird portrayals of the King.
Agent Elvis: Season 1
Elvis Presley has recently reentered the zeitgeist, as the subject of two rootin’ tootin’ productions so loud and brash one almost feels nervous about watching them on a school night. First came Baz Luhrmann’s characteristically bling-filled biopic, featuring a pelvis-breaking amount of hip gyration. And now there’s Netflix’s animated series Agent Elvis, which, co-created by Priscilla Presley, recasts the King of Rock ‘n’ Roll (voiced by Matthew McConaughey) as an agent for a secret government spy organisation. This group has been “quietly shaping history” for centuries, with a modus operandi to “infiltrate, instigate, appropriate and fumigate to keep America safe.” He’s also accompanied by a psychotic cocaine-consuming chimp.
Harebrained plotlines involve Elvis—now heavily armed and brilliant at karate—juggling showbiz with fighting crime and interacting with other historical figures, including Charles Manson and Howard Hughes. It’s very fast and flashy, with a graphic novel-esque aesthetic chopped up and rearranged every which way. Backgrounds turn into spectacles of light and colour, and the frame is sliced into split-screens—one, 13 minutes into the first episode, comprising seven shard-like spaces, with Elvis smack-bang in the middle, wearing green shades and wielding a golden pistol.
Agent Elvis is fun but overwhelming—the kind of production the phrase “style over substance” was coined for. The style is so intense it overpowers everything else, constantly returning the experience to surface details. It’s enjoyable in a snackable way: take a bite here and there, but watch too much and you’ll feel like you’ve been run over by a very impressively decorated train.
This series isn’t the first time Presley’s legend has been repurposed for narratives that have little or nothing to do with his music. Here’s three movies in which the King (and in one case a bunch of impersonators) came back, in a weird new form, squinting through chunky shades and getting up to mischief.
Bubba Ho-Tep (2002)
Writer/director Don Coscarelli takes the entertainingly dumb “Elvis never died” conspiracy theory and runs with it—right into lewd humour and OTW horror. In this film’s alternate reality, Elvis (Bruce Campbell) is alive and living in a Texas nursing home, where he reflects on his penis infection and wonders: “If Priscilla discovered I was alive, would she come and see me? Would we still wanna fuck?” Part of the humour involves the King being over-the-hill and gross. And yet, because of Campbell’s poignant performance, you root for this crusty old dirty bag; you really want him to succeed.
This is particularly important when the horror element kicks in and the protagonist teams up with a sidekick, of sorts: Ossie Davis’s Jack, an elderly black man who claims to be John F. Kennedy (insisting he survived an assassination attempt and then dyed his skin black). They take on the ghost of an ancient Egyptian mummy in a plot thread that’s silly but somehow, impressively, doesn’t derail the film’s emotional oomph. The atmosphere is dark and dripping, but there’s an appealing amount of levity.
Elvis & Nixon (2016)
Elvis & Nixon
Liza Johnson’s comedy-drama is conceptually aligned to Agent Elvis, in that it depicts Presley (Michael Shannon) as an aspiring action hero, longing to work as an agent for the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs. Which actually is close to the truth. In real-life Elvis met with President Richard Nixon to request he be given a badge and named a “Federal Agent at Large”, arguing he was “right in the middle” of the pro-drugs and anti-American sentiment, thus best served to combat it. No transcription was recorded of their meeting, giving the screenwriters plenty of room for dramatic license.
At first Shannon seems an odd fit: he doesn’t look much like Presley, for starters, and doesn’t play up to the expected elements i.e. the King’s heartthrob status and air of vulnerability. Nevertheless his portrayal feels like a genuine, lived-in depiction, reflecting the actor’s knack for approaching roles from unexpected perspectives. It’s fun to watch Elvis bounce off Richard Nixon, who’s played with an unusual level of charm by Kevin Spacey. This isn’t a great film by any stretch—but it’s amiably paced and enjoyably acted.
3000 Miles to Graceland (2001)
A group of criminals descend on an international Elvis convention in Vegas and rob a casino while in full costume. It’s not just a nifty disguise: the leader of the pack, Kevin Costner’s Murphy, is a diehard aficionado, early in the runtime bringing a convertible to a screeching halt in order to chastise a fellow crim for making a harmless joke about Presley (because “nobody fucks with the King”). The heist occurs about 20 mins in and culminates in a deluge of bullets. One of the robbers (Bokeem Woodbine’s Franklin) dies, leaving the rest (Murphy, Kurt Russell’s Michael and Christian Slater’s Hanson) to argue about their share of the loot.
The tone is down and dirty, and the narrative peppered with familiar elements: think “who’s screwing who?” and “there’s no honour among thieves.” 3000 Miles to Graceland is larded with conventions but sustains tension pretty well. It’s a shame the runtime crosses the two hour mark: this could’ve been better as a tight, lithe 90 minutes.
