User Reviews

For starters, if you are an Elvis fan, prepare to laugh your butt off...or just plain be *+ss!d. This comedy is funny and a little sick. Harmony Jones(Kim Basinger)is a traveling cosmetic sales woman...a Pink Lady...primarily pushing lipstick. While on the road, she witnesses an Elvis impersonator(Richard Kind)burst into flames. Trying to avoid being arrested for murder; she hits the road. Along the way, a couple more impersonators(David Leisure and Tom Hanks) bite the dust with Harmony inadvertently involved. Now two hapless FBI agents(Mike Starr and Phill Lewis)are hot on her trail. A bewildered Miss Jones accidentally meets the man of her dreams...a depressed advertising executive(John Corbett), who happens to be taking his estranged wife's(Denise Richards)Elvis suit to an impersonators convention in Vegas. Harmony thinks the suit is his and hopes to avoid harm coming to him. Also in the cast: Sean Astin, Annie Potts and Angie Dickinson. Wayne Newton and Pat Morita appear in cameos. Fluff and fun. Basinger proves to still be an eyeful. Corbett is great in the role sharing the romantic lead.

I saw this movie on a westbound American Airlines flight. It was so bad it actually made the flight seem longer. The plot had potential (who wouldn't love a movie about a woman who accidentally kills every Elvis impersonator she meets?) but it got screwed up a million different times by really poor writing. Towards the end is an embarrassingly bad scene where a gang of Elvis impersonators is on the roof of a casino reshipping the sky thinking he's going to return, then a group of stars moves together to form an "Elvis" constellation, which promptly shoots a bolt of lightning at the impersonators, sending them crashing through the roof. Bad...REALLY bad. Which is the theme for the whole movie. I'd avoid this one at all costs.

This film is like a jigsaw puzzle put together with the pieces from 5 different boxes, so nothing fits together and the end result is an awkward mess. Box #1 is a darkly comic take on the Elvis impersonator phenomenon and the pathetic people who take it way too seriously. Box #2 is a plaintive spin on a woman looking for love after a lifetime consumed by her job as a cosmetics saleswoman. The third set of pieces are about that same woman's odd relationship with Elvis Pressley, complete with flashbacks to Elvis-involved moments from her childhood and an internal monologue where she talks to The King like he was her guardian angel. Even more parts of the story revolve around the struggles of an advertising executive trying to do his job with some creative integrity, of all things, and appear to be in the movie solely because Sean Astin, of all people, agreed to take a supporting role. And the fifth concept that got chopped up and ungracefully jammed into Elvis Has Left The Building is two FBI agents straight out of an off Broadway revival of The Odd Couple. Oh, and there's a gay character who would have been a boring stereotype in 1994, let alone a decade later when this thing was made.

Harmony Jones (Kim Basinger) is a traveling saleswoman on a tour of the Great American Southwest, trying to recruit other women to start pushing Pink Lady Cosmetics. A childhood encounter with Elvis has left her with a lifelong, emotional bond with the music legend that starts sweet and turns satirical when Harmony starts running into Elvis impersonators as they accidentally kill themselves. That's what brings in two mismatched federal agents (Mike Starr and Phill Lewis) to investigate the death spree. There's also the handsome ad man (John Corbett) on his way to Las Vegas to drop off his soon-to-be-ex-wife's Elvis costume who runs into Harmony and instantly chases after her like a starving dog after a pound of hamburger. The ad man is also constantly on the phone with his assistant in New York (Sean Astin), arguing over how trashy a new campaign should be.

Kim Basinger always has a certain appeal and if someone with some talent had been brought in to radically rewrite this horrible script, taking Harmony, John Corbett's character and the whole Elvis motif and excising pretty much everything else, maybe director Joel Zwick could have used that to make a romantic comedy that didn't stink on ice. Elvis Has Left The Building is so inept, I'd bet money that it never occurred to credited writers Mitchell Ganem and Adam-Michael Garber how much the name Harmony Jones sounds like something out of 1970s "blaxploitation" flick. Their plot is dependent on people behaving like morons. They wouldn't know a good joke if it landed on their head like an Acme anvil squashing Wile E. Coyote. At least 50% of the scenes they've written here should have never been shot, forget about left on the cutting room floor.

Normally, a bad movie has several bad things about it. Elvis Has Left The Building has only one flaw but this awful script is so terrible that it drags everything else down like cement shoes on a Mafia informant. If you ever wanted evidence that no one in the movie business knows a good screenplay from a bad one, look no further. Not that you should actually watch this fiasco, of course.

Call me sick, but seeing bad Elvis impersonators get offed by the score is my idea of fun. How many times have they offended our eyes, ears and occasionally even our noses - It was high time that someone would pay them back! My wife and I laughed out loud in several instances and she kept rewinding the mailbox scene so many times that I thought she was trying to kill me as well, rolling on the floor and choking on my laughter as I was.

The whole movie was very entertaining and plain fun, the actors seemed to understand that this movie is not to be taken as a dead serious comedy either and overplayed their roles suitably. I loved the gay receptionist - Yes, clichéd, overplayed and absolutely unrealistic, but he was portraying the quintessential caricature of a gay receptionist with a lot of warmth and good natured humor. The other characters reactions to him were a sight to behold.

The only thing that could have improved this movie would have been another few dead Elvis impersonators offed one by one, not all at once. Oh well, one can always hope for a sequel?

For a 10-year-old, this is an entertaining movie. Funny but far-fetched and at times, stupid and slow. But a good pace for a kid.

But I am not ten, so I didn't LIKE it, but it was okay.

I liked the idea of Harmony Jones, and the flashbacks. They added a LOT of much-needed charm to the movie. Harmony and her accidental/coincidental Elvis-impersonator killing spree I thought was a hilarious idea, and Kim Basinger played the part actually very well. But the overall execution of it was what brought the movie down. Actually, the detectives brought the movie down...

The problem with the movie however, was the lack of development with the Miles character, and Sean Astin's character and his place in the movie. Basically, he talked to Miles on the phone and had no relation to Harmony which made his character hard to place. Also, a grave mistake was that they brought in the Miles-and-Harmony "love interest" way too late. Another thing I really didn't like were the dynamic-duo cops. They really made me cringe.

But a definite high point was Kim Basinger. She did very well in the roll of Harmony Jones and the flashbacks really let you love her character. Another good thing was Las Vegas. Its already unreal setting gave the Elvis-impersonators a welcome stage.

And I loved the pink cadillacs. It made the movie look like it at least tried to be good.