Elvis has left has returned to the building to give everything he has to his fans one last time.
With EPiC: Elvis Presley in Concert, director-producer Baz Luhrmann does even more to showcase the musical artistry of the “King of Rock and Roll” than he did with his 2022 Oscar-nominated biopic, Elvis (which I also reviewed).
Luhrmann makes EPiC a truly cinematic event, and the best film in which Elvis himself ever appeared, immersing the viewer fully in the singer’s orbit and capturing his seemingly boundless energy and insane charisma. As a lifelong Elvis fan, this is the closest I’ll ever get to what it must have been like to see him perform live; I would recommend seeing the film in IMAX for the maximum you-are-there effect.
For EPiC, Luhrmann and editor-executive producer Jonathan Redmond assembled and painstakingly restored once-lost footage (over 50 hours worth) from the past concert films Elvis: That’s the Way It Is and Elvis on Tour, and strategically utilized soundbites from a wide swath of archival interviews and live albums to allow Elvis to narrate his own story.
That so many different rights holders cooperated to help this film see the light of day is a small entertainment industry miracle, and I assume if Baz’s Elvis biopic had flopped at the box office, EPiC would never have happened. Unsurprisingly, EPiC is a companion piece to that biopic and owes much of its aesthetic style and narrative flow to that film, from how it frames Elvis’ story, to the same remixes and rearrangements of his songs used in the 2022 film, to even using the same spangled, gaudy credits design. One notable difference, however: NEON is the distributor of EPiC, while 2022’s Elvis was a Warner Bros. release.
One probably shouldn’t have expected Luhrmann to make a standard concert documentary, as the director added several ostentatious stylistic flourishes throughout, like wildly crosscutting between several entirely different Elvis performances of the same song to create some truly exhilarating musical sequences; the big standout examples are “Polk Salad Annie” and “Burning Love.”
You don’t have to be an Elvis fan to watch this film and be amazed at how much Presley delivered as a showman. He leaves everything on the stage here. One of the final images is of him exiting the stage and getting into an elevator, drenched in sweat and absolutely spent. His dedication to his craft and to entertaining his audience is on full display throughout EPiC, whether it’s directing his band, or his humorous, warm exchanges with fans in the crowd; he’s so thirsty at one point that he just reaches down and drinks someone’s cocktail.
EPiC shows Elvis in his absolute prime, vital and full of life. It’s sad and stunning to realize he’d become a bloated caricature of himself and die just a few years after this footage was taken. And since EPiC has Elvis telling his own story, he only reveals to us his best self. We obviously don’t get any deep, dark secrets coming from the man himself; don’t expect him to spill any tea about his relationship with his then-wife, Priscilla, or any of his other love interests. As for Elvis’ substance abuse, the closest EPiC comes to acknowledging it is when he cracks a joke about morphine.
But viewers will learn a tremendous amount about his love of all styles of music, witness how he crafted a live show, and see him interact – albeit briefly – with other celebs and music artists such as Sammy Davis Jr., Cary Grant, and Clyde McPhatter (who was a huge influence on Elvis).
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