The King is Dead

3000 Miles To Graceland Dir: Damien       Lichtenstein Starring Kevin Costner Kurt Russel Courtney Cox Christian Slater 2001 R, 125 m RATING: 2 out of 10

A SIDEBURN SHAMBLES: A huge cast is wasted in music video director Lichtenstein's sloppy, flashy, empty attempt at an action film.

Kevin Costner has been known for doing projects that waste his waning talent, and 3000 Miles to Graceland ranks right down there with The Postman as one of the worst films he has had the misfortune of being associated with.  It's at best a sloppy, thoroughly boring pseudo action-drama-comedy that destroys any interest or momentum it was building after the first half hour. Costner, Russel, Slater, David Arquette and Bokeem Woodbine star as a gang of hoods who dress up like Elvis to rob a Las Vegas casino during International Elvis week.  After the caper turns into a bloodbath (predictably), Costner decides to blow away the majority of the cast and it's up to he, Russell, and Courtney Cox as the requisite love interest and David Kaye as the requisite 10 year old to carry the picture into the depths of strangling boredom and mediocrity. With the Elvis premise, one would expect the gang of criminal Elvi to be sought after and be confused with other impersonators, but that's never the case.  Instead we are treated to the wooden acting of all the cast members, cliche after cliche evident in both action and movie-of-the-week plotting, and the grating, irrating penchant of music video director Lichtenstein to speed up, slow down, flash cut, and jerk the film around for no reason.  In a pariticularly excessive, laughable shot, he decides to film Russel and Cox parking at a motel in slow-motion with MTV style flashes of white to the an ear-scraping heavy metal soundtrack. With no plot to speak of, uniformly lazy performances by the entire cast, and atrocious pacing, editing, plotting, dialogue, and cinematography, one would at least expect 3000 Miles to have some slightly rousing good action sequences.  This film/music video fails in even that respect, which is why it's my pick for one of 2001's worst films of the year.

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