Review: Big Mommas: Like Father, Like Son

Reviews

The King

Near-horror film about Elvis's lost years

By NINA MACLAUGHLIN | June 14, 2006

3.0 Stars

BIBLICALLY BAD: The King is intense

British director James Marsh crams a whole lot of myths and allusions into The King -- Oedipus, Hamlet, the Prodigal Son -- and a whole lot of transgressions -- incest, arson, prostitution. And when things go bad, they go Biblically bad. Y tu mamá también co-star Gael García Bernal plays Elvis Valderez, who leaves the Navy and heads to Corpus Christi to find the father who abandoned him. Successful, self-important pastor David Sandow (William Hurt) spurns his son again, wanting to put his godless past behind him. Elvis, calm and good-natured on the surface, makes his way into his dad’s idyllic life and begins to enact supreme revenge. Pell James and Paul Dano are standouts as the pastor’s innocent-experienced teenage kids, and Marsh does a good job of exploring God and sin and forgiveness. But it’s Bernal’s quiet intensity that propels The King and elevates its horror to mythic proportions.

Related: Georgia Rule, D-Back rampage, Comma self, More

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Ending violence
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True grit
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Doing the right thing
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Southern discomfort
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Healey's hypocrisy
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Topics: Reviews , Elvis Presley, Crime, Sexual Offenses, More

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Watch the trailer for The King (QuickTime)

ARTICLES BY NINA MACLAUGHLIN

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Age 30, I quit the Phoenix and ended up with a job as an apprentice to a carpenter. Sawing, chiseling, hammering, nail-gunning, tiling, sanding, slotting, framing, hauling, measuring, and sweeping are less obvious outcomes of an undergraduate career in the liberal arts. College, in strange and unexpected ways, prepared me for this sort of work. And in others, did not prepare me at all.

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DON'T BE AN IDIOT | January 27, 2011
We're all idiots when we're 18. We're all idiots for the first half of our 20s, and longer, for some. By saying so, we're not trying to insult anyone.