Great Balls of Fire! Blu-ray Movie

Rating summary

Movie		3.0
Video		3.0
Audio		4.0
Extras		0.5
Overall		3.0

Great Balls of Fire! Blu-ray Movie Review

"If I'm going to hell, I'm going there playing the piano!"

Reviewed by Kenneth Brown June 14, 2025

Writer/director Jim McBride's uneven 'Great Balls of Fire!' was originally released on Blu-ray by Olive Films in 2018. That edition, which has since gone out of print, is being replaced by a Sandpiper Pictures release, which returns 'Great Balls of Fire!' to Blu-ray with average video and solid audio, albeit with the same barebones supplemental package as Olive's previous version. The high-energy biopic stars Dennis Quaid as Jerry Lee Lewis alongside Winona Ryder, John Doe, Stephen Tobolowsky, Trey Wilson, Alec Baldwin, Lisa Blount, Lisa Jane Persky, Peter Cook, John Bloom and Robert Lesser.

Your enjoyment of Great Balls of Fire! will come down to how much you love Jerry Lee Lewis's music in relation to how far you're willing to follow Dennis Quaid down a very deep, very erratic performance hole. Broad and borderline silly, his flare for the dramatic nearly derails the picture, with his co-stars looking positively asleep compared to his kinetic preening. It's overacting, at times, for overacting's sake, whether that comes down to Quaid or choices in the editing bay we'll never know. But if you can go along with what the actor has to offer, what remains amounts to a decent biography, even though the story itself leaves a lot to the imagination.

"Well, you see I was still married to my first wife when I married my second wife, so I never really was married to my second wife. And since I divorced my first wife a couple of years ago, I'm as free as a bird in a tree!"

The film begins with a short prologue in which two kids secretly visit a popular bar known for hosting black artists that play 'the Devil's music'. They instantly recognize it and one of them runs away. The other kid, Lewis, stays and is seen completely mesmerized by the wild rhythms and harmonies that are forcing people inside the bar to shake their bodies in all kinds of odd ways. A few decades later, not long after the folks at the Sun Records label have allowed RCA Victor to take over the recording contract of their biggest star, Elvis Presley, the camera begins following closely Lewis (Dennis Quaid). He is already a great performer, but no one is willing to recognize his talent because his music just isn't right for white people. This drives Lewis crazy and it seems like he is about to snap and do something really stupid. Then one day he finally gets a break and the top guy at Sun Records hands him a contract. The rest of the film is a bit chaotic, but it probably needed to be because after jumping to the very top of the Billboard singles chart Lewis marries his thirteen-year-old cousin Myra Gale Brown (Winona Ryder) and in a matter of weeks heads right back to the bottom. His first international tour is a total disaster and after he is forced to prematurely end it and return home it begins to look like his controversial marriage might have irreversibly broken his bond with the crowds that once loved his music.

Click here to read the rest of Dr. Svet Atanasov's review of Great Balls of Fire!, which he says offers "a lot of interesting and good things," though he isn't "at all convinced that Dennis Quaid was the right actor to play Jerry Lee Lewis." Adding, "I find many of his mood swings to be completely random and actually hurting the authenticity of his famous character. On the other hand, I am convinced that Jim McBride had the right idea about how to structure his film and what type of identity to give it so that it accomplishes its goal."

Great Balls of Fire! Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Sandpiper's 1080p/AVC-encoded video transfer, much like the film itself, is extremely uneven; striking at times but disappointing far too often to earn a pass, much less a high grade. Colors are washed out more often than not, with pale skintones, lackluster primaries, merely decent black levels and inconsistent contrast leveling. Saturation is dialed in too brightly, and shadow delineation a touch too open and revealing, leaving Great Balls of Fire! looking less filmic than a proper remaster would presumably allow. Detail also fluctuates. Edges are clean and relatively well-defined, without too much in the way of noticeable ringing, and textures are nicely resolved in close-ups. However, overall clarity is left wanting. The most memorable scenes -- Lewis's musical numbers -- are much more colorful than anything that precedes or follows them, but softness is bountiful, making it clear that the film's master is older and out of date. There are also intermittent specks that appear, and compression doesn't hold up to close scrutiny, though it isn't all that offensive either. All told, this would've made for a fine first or second generation Blu-ray disc, but in 2025, the bar is simply too high to recommend this one. For fans only.

Great Balls of Fire! Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

Also disappointing is Great Ball of Fire's DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0 stereo track. It gets the job done, and I've certainly heard worse, but there's a lot left to be desired, particularly from the musical sequences. Surround channels would've been a boon here, as the camera swoops and sways through rowdy crowds and adoring fans. Ah well. Voices, spoken or singing, are clear, intelligible and well-prioritized at all times, the music sounds quite good (front centric as it is), and effects, though a bit canned, come through perfectly.

Great Balls of Fire! Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

The only extra included with the Blu-ray release of Great Balls of Fire! is the film's theatrical trailer.

Great Balls of Fire! Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

Great Balls of Fire! is all at once invigorating and a let down, juking and bounding between engaging biopic and rick-roaring performance impulsivity. Quaid inhabits Jerry Lee Lewis but his work borders on parody. Whether his choices, editing bay decisions, or both, his Lewis is a dervish Tasmanian Devil, ripping from scene to scene without much consideration for the connective tissue of the picture. Sandpiper's Blu-ray release isn't that much better, offering a subpar video transfer, a merely solid DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0 stereo track, and no extras save a theatrical trailer.