There’s a feeling most people will recognize, like leafing through a photo album you’ve seen a hundred times — the faces are familiar, the stories predictable, and the memories, whether pleasant or not, are faded at the edges. Return of the King: The Fall and Rise of Elvis Presley feels just like that. Jason Hehir’s film takes you back to moments in history viewers will already know by heart (well, people of a certain age or interest, anyway), lingering on well-trodden narratives and smiling knowingly as if to say, “remember this?”
The image of Elvis, decked out in black leather and wet with sweat, gripping the mic like a lifeline, is the moment this documentary wants to live in forever. Which is understandable; the 1968 NBC special the film depicts is electric, a shot of pure charisma that resurrected a star from the wreckage of his movie career. But instead of staying in that singular moment — leaning into the nerves, the stakes, the aliveness of it all — Hehir decides to rewind. And rewind. And rewind.
First, we’re dropped back in Tupelo. Then we visit the hips that made parents clutch their pearls. From there, we see Elvis’ Army years, the gaudy Hollywood musicals, the slide into irrelevance. In other words, the King’s fall from grace is summarized with such brisk efficiency that it’s fair to genuinely wonder if the filmmakers were worried some viewers hadn’t heard it all before. The film’s title promises a “rise,” but the climb feels perfunctory. Instead of digging into the grit and desperation that fueled Elvis’ return to form, we’re handed a parade of talking heads — Elvis’s former wife, Priscilla, Bruce Springsteen, Conan O’Brien — offering commentary that ranges from insightful to baffling.
Even the people who might have had fresh insights or intimate details to offer — Priscilla, Elvis’s close friend Jerry Schilling — largely stick to the script. We “learn” that Elvis was nervous. Col. Tom Parker was difficult. The stakes were high. We’ve simply heard and seen all of this before, and Baz Luhrmann showing up to add a glossy co-sign to all of this doesn’t change its fundamental inability to surprise.
A brief shimmer of something more magical arrives when the film slows down and lets us linger on the special itself. Elvis laughing through mistakes or his voice cracking are a fine reminder of why this moment was so monumental; glimpses of the aging, imperfect, but still remarkable human beneath the superstar sheen. But just as quickly, The Return of the King zooms back out, ducking once again into the familiar beats of hagiography. The film seems unwilling to sit in the discomfort of complexity; afraid, perhaps, that peeling back the layers might reveal a man rather than a myth, and that’s not what Hehir is celebrating here.
Elvis, at his best, was an untouchable force; The Return of the King, conversely, feels too cautious to touch anything. It reveres rather than interrogates, like a museum exhibit that’s been curated merely to confirm instead of to challenge. You leave the film with no new stories, no new insights; all we’re left with are the same old photographs, dusted off and arranged for display. If you’re looking for lighting in a bottle, just watch the original special. It’s all there, unfiltered, unpolished, and alive.
DIRECTOR: Jason Hehir; DISTRIBUTOR: Netflix; STREAMING: November 13; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 31 min.
Comments are closed.