3000 Miles to Graceland

Demian Lichtenstein's "3,000 Miles to Graceland" is a hybrid: it combines plot elements of "Ocean's 11" and "Honeymoon in Vegas" and lumps in the entertainment value of, oh, "Roustabout" or maybe "Blue Hawaii." This bloated spectacle has all the get-up-and-go of one of the legendary late-era Elvis Presley concerts. The picture feels longer than Presley's career and as irrelevant as he was by the end. Kurt Russell shows that there's very little rust on his Elvis Presley impersonation, the one that put him back on the map more than 20 years ago in John Carpenter's television biopic "Elvis." Mr. Russell's Elvis imitations are the few crumbs of fun that he and the audience get. He plays Michael, fresh out of prison and looking slightly over the hill, who joins a gang led by his old friend Murphy (Kevin Costner) in knocking over the casino of the Riviera Hotel in Las Vegas. Michael, Murphy and the boys (the gang includes Christian Slater, David Arquette and Bokeem Woodbine) hit the streets of Vegas wearing the high-collar, big-belted jumpsuits that fit the King like a sausage casing, blending in with a bunch of other Elvis impersonators during International Elvis Week, though even under normal circumstances their garish outfits wouldn't stand out there. (Mr. Woodbine, in a **** outfit and a slapdash wig, gets the biggest laugh.) In case you can't figure out that these guys are going to turn against one another, a pair of computer-animated scorpions, gleaming like the chrome on Michael's arrest-me-red '59 Cadillac, attack each other during the opening credits. Soon, Michael and Murphy are the last men standing, gearing up for a clash of the polyester-clad titans. Caught in the middle of their war are the scheming Cybil (Courteney Cox) and her larcenous little boy, Jesse (David Kaye), who conveniently has the name of Presley's twin brother, dead at birth. Wait, there are more Elvis tie-ins; Murphy is obsessed with the King, proudly wearing a pair of late-era Presley mutton-chop sideburns (though by now Mr. Costner is so craggy that he looks like a member of a Nascar pit crew), and several people in the film believe they may be illegitimate Presley offspring. Their claims of rock 'n' roll parenthood are probably about as worthless as this film, which has long stretches of scenes as arid and flat as the Nevada badlands. The cinematographer, David Franco, does a slick job, providing the picture with hot desert-rat lighting. "Graceland" plays on the interest Presley still generates. (Apparently people are naming their children after him, poor kids.) The Elvi swagger through the waist-deep shag of the casino as if they have a new lease on life. Mr. Costner even seems to have developed a pair of hips for the first time in his career. Mostly, though, "Graceland" is an idea whose time has come and gone. It feels like an officially sanctioned guerrilla operation; all the Elvi need are corporate sponsor patches on the capes of their costumes. Mr. Costner takes some joy in snarling his way through the film. It's a pleasure to see him relieved of his earnestness, though not enough of a pleasure. The wall-to-wall violence won't satisfy fans of high-caliber shootouts, though the most practiced filmmaker at these sequences, the Hong Kong action director John Woo, may wonder what's left for him to do, since his bag of slow-motion tricks has been so thoroughly plundered there's not even a lining left in that satchel anymore. There's no end to the dumb jokes. Paul Anka is the Riviera's dyspeptic head of security who complains about the Presley mystique. And "Graceland" climaxes with Presley's version of "My Way," which Mr. Anka wrote, as Murphy makes the grand exit that eluded Elvis. Thomas Haden Church and Kevin Pollak play a pair of bored wise-guy F.B.I. agents tracking the robbers, and their cynicism wears well. After being brought up to speed on the robbers' backgrounds, Mr. Church says, "I couldn't make this up." Apparently the writers of "3,000 Miles to Graceland," Mr. Lichtenstein and Richard Recco, couldn't do a very good job of it, either. Fortunately, as they used to say at Presley shows, there will be no encores.

I have not yet been disappointed by a movie nearly so strongly as this stinker. The main plot I don’t need to give away—chances are all readers know this is (ostensibly) an Elvis-themed movie—but I will say it’s incredibly predictable. The characters are remarkably unsympathetic and very flat. A relatively interesting subplot goes nowhere. The scorpion fight that eats up the first two minutes—WTF?!?! I would give this 0, but the casino robbery itself, I grudgingly concede, is quite well done. All the equipment that went into making this crap should be buried in the Nevada desert, 3000 miles underground, in a box labelled "CONTAGIOUS: DO NOT TOUCH".

Tedious, clichêd, and unnecessarily violent, "3000 Miles to Graceland" is the cinematic proof that movies with an outstanding cast can **** massive balls.