Greenes
Please don't spend money on this.
AnhartLinkin
This story has more twists and turns than a second-rate soap opera.
Brainsbell
The story-telling is good with flashbacks.The film is both funny and heartbreaking. You smile in a scene and get a soulcrushing revelation in the next.
TheLittleSongbird
Elvis Presley was a hugely influential performer with one of the most distinctive singing voices of anybody. He embarked on a film career consisting of 33 films from 1956 to 1969, films that did well at the box-office but mostly panned critically (especially his later films) and while he was a highly charismatic performer he was never considered a great actor.As said many times, a lot of Elvis' early efforts were decent or more, his five best films overall being 'King Creole', 'Flaming Star', 'Jailhouse Rock', 'Viva Las Vegas' and 'Loving You'. It was from 'Kissin' Cousins', his first real mediocre at best effort, onward when his films became hit and miss or worse. While Elvis certainly did worse, like 'Harum Scarum', 'Double Trouble' generally is down there with his weakest.Regarding Elvis himself, there is more of the relaxed charisma and the enthusiastic charm than in most of his 1965-7 output (most of which he looked utterly disinterested in), the role really doesn't require much but he does his best and while he has looked in better shape he still sounds good. A few of the songs are decent, "Long Legged Girl" is the best of the lot and for a song from an Elvis film from this period is good. "City of Night" and "Could I Fall in Love" also fare well.Some of the supporting cast also don't fare too badly considering what they were given to work with. Fun Leon Askin, lovable Norman Rossington, urbane John Williams and sultry Yvonne Romain come off best. Chips Rafferty is quite good too.However, not all the supporting cast and songs work. Annette Day's acting inexperience comes through loud and clear in a performance that neglects any acting ability of any kind. She shares very little chemistry with Elvis either. Michael Murphy, in his screen debut, does his best and gives a creepiness at times but in a way where the darkness doesn't balance particularly well with the rest of the film. Stanley Adams and Walter Burke try too hard in bumbling roles more at home in a sitcom and the Wiere Brothers are just annoying and don't fit.Apart from a few songs, the rest of the soundtrack suffers from being very forgettable, very sloppy lip-synchronisation (very rarely in time) and from being poorly recorded, almost like the equipment used was on its last legs and on the verge of breaking down any second. Only one of them reaches risible level though and that's "Old MacDonald Had a Farm", even Elvis himself looks embarrassed.Norman Taurog's, a wildly variable director dependent on the material, direction is all over the map. As is the corny (even for an Elvis film) and wildly disjointed script, that is far too busy, and a story that is a mess of style, structure and tone, again trying to do too much and very little of it comes together (just didn't see the point of the diamond subplot especially considering how barely remembered it is in the film).Overall, not awful but messy. Really strictly for the fans, and most likely even they will be pining for a film that lives up to Elvis' considerable talents rather than working against them. 4/10 Bethany Cox
bkoganbing
In his career Elvis Presley did three Hawaiian based films for which he got a nice Hawaiian vacation to shoot there. But for Double Trouble which is European based, the King never left the MGM lot for this film. All the scenes in London, Brussels, Antwerp, and Stockholm were strictly second unit establishing stuff. He must have thought he was gypped.And Double Trouble is not as good as either Paradise Hawaiian Style or Blue Hawaii, the latter one Elvis's very best. And he's not playing or courting twins either. Instead he's a pop singer on tour in Europe who gets mixed up with a pair of women. One is Yvonne Romain a worldly, but deadly sophisticate the other is a teen just days shy of seventeen played by Annette Day.For reasons it takes the whole film to figure out why people keep trying to kill Presley. In fact this plot is quite serious as young Annette Day is in danger and Presley by his association with her. But this is an Elvis film so songs and comedy are added. I would say rather shoehorned in to fit the kind of films Presley was making. It's entertaining, but muddled.As always, Colonel Tom Parker made sure that Elvis was surrounded with veteran film names and established character players. Chips Rafferty and Norman Rossington play an inept pair of smugglers and con men who slip a fortune in jewels into his luggage and spend the entire film trying one loony scheme after another to recover them. John Williams is Day's uncle and guardian, Leon Askin is a Swedish police lieutenant with the Wiere Brothers as his assistants.Note the hair stylings of the musicians backing Presley up in his act. If that wasn't a salute to the British invasion and an attempt to steal a few Beatles fans, I don't what else you could call it.Not one of the King's best
MARIO GAUCI
Against all my expectations, this turned out to be almost as "way out" a comedy as STAY AWAY, JOE (1968)! The generic title would indicate a dual role for Elvis but what we have here instead – surprise, surprise – is him being chased by two women at the same time. The would-be groovy title sequence promises an "Elvis in Swinging London"-type of thing but what we get eventually is a wildly disparate hodgepodge of genres which, frankly, do not jell at all well: including a chase-driven comedy-thriller in the vein of the Bob Hope vehicles of the 1940s dealing with damsels in distress who are up for large inheritances but, this being the era of the James Bond extravaganzas, with an artificial spy/action flick texture clumsily laid on! Annette Day is a rather weak leading lady (not surprisingly, this is still her only movie to date) and much more interesting – and enticing – is her rival, the half-Maltese Yvonne Romain (who's eventually revealed to be the villainess). Also in the cast is the ever-reliable John Williams as Day's outwardly gracious but ultimately scheming uncle/guardian; Chips Rafferty and Norman Rossington as a couple of bumbling crooks (who manage to be quite amusing under the circumstances)…but not so The Wiere Brothers – surely among the most resistible comedy teams in living memory! – as a trio of feather-brained Belgian police detectives out to catch the Rafferty/Rossington team.I don't know if I really should mention this but Elvis Presley's rendition of the standard children's ditty "Old MacDonald's Farm" is featured here for posterity's sake! Oink, oink...
Shane Paterson
Hear Elvis say "bikkies" (a kick for me, as one who grew up with that contraction of "biscuits," in America known as cookies), see Elvis lay his kenpo down on a bad guy who dies as a result, see Elvis drive a VW bug, witness Elvis smash windows, marvel at Elvis in a mustache and glasses mask, and watch him beat up a beautiful woman! Those are some of the highlights, anyway. In truth, this film is among my very least favorite of Elvis films, even judging by the somewhat unique standards of the '60s travelogue Technicolor musicals that became the standard by 1962. The formula had worn thin by 1965 ("Frankie And Johnnie," "Harum Scarum," "Paradise, Hawaiian Style"), to say the least, and -- other than some bright points in "Spinout" and the entirety of "Easy Come, Easy Go" (like "Double Trouble," shot in 1966...for some reason, I like that crazy film) -- nothing got better, in my opinion, until the formula changed radically with 1968's "Stay Away, Joe" and "Live A Little, Love A Little." The period 1965-1967 was Elvis' nadir, in other words, though the May, 1966 Nashville sessions (that yielded the immaculate "How Great Thou Art" gospel album and a few stellar secular songs, including a definitive take on one of Bob Dylan's songs) and recently-surfaced home recordings from that period show all too well how phenomenal Elvis' talent was at the time, a contrast that would anger and frustrate anyone who cared about his place in American and world culture and history. But we have what we have, and the criminal waste of talent that to a great extent represented Elvis' film career during this time is undeniable but shouldn't necessarily result in us writing off the results out of hand for that reason alone. There are a few moments in this film that are good, and a few when Elvis seems to actually be engaged rather than bored with the whole proceedings and just sleepwalking through it to fulfill contractual obligations. There're some great actors in supporting roles, too, like Leon Askin (General Burkhalter!), Chips Rafferty, John Williams, Norman Rossington (the only actor to appear in films with the Beatles and Elvis), and Michael Murphy. Annette Day is kind of lackluster in the lead female role. Yvonne Romain is much more like it. And the Wiere Brothers have always irritated the hell out of me in this film -- wish they were not in it, because they really stupid things up.The songs are not the greatest even compared to other songs from Elvis movies of this time, but I do like the title track, "Long Legged Girl" (a tasty song, actually, written by Joy Byers, who usually contributed great songs even to otherwise not-so-great movies, such as "Let Yourself Go" in "Speedway"), and the jazzy "City By Night." "Could I Fall In Love" is a nice ballad, a duet of Elvis with Elvis, but the entire June, 1966 session for this movie suffered from sonic problems and I believe it's one that Elvis complained vociferously about. I also believe that Elvis walked out on recording "Old McDonald" before he'd produced an acceptable master take, being totally disgusted by the task, and the master was spliced from what the engineers had captured. Not his greatest recorded moment, anyway. And, darn it, it (and the rest of the soundtrack) was recorded on my second birthday.IMDb mixes up the screen character credits for Chips Rafferty and Norman Rossington but, to be fair, so does the end title sequence in the film. Oops.
