3000 Miles to Graceland
This is a terrible, horrible film, a big-budget student film with stupidity and insipidity written all over it. AOL Keyword: Suck. Imagine Ice-T, suspended by his ankles and sliding along a cable suspended from the ceiling, in the line of fire, spinning and shooting his guns. This was supposed to be the moment when people go, “Wow, bad ass.” Instead, the meager audience, weary from groaning and giggling and snorting with derision for two hours, laugh out loud, so desperate are they for entertainment in this wasteland of awfulness. Even Las Vegas isn’t this cheesy.
Yeah, I knew Kevin Costner was in it. I knew the rest of the cast was not enough to make up for Costner’s inherent shoddiness factor, but I had no idea the movie could fail on so many levels! The first five minutes is a rock and roll video of two CGI scorpions in a weird, video-game-like battle to their mutual plastic deaths. Very, very telling. Bookending the film is a freakodopolis curtain call of Kurt Russell singing an Elvis number with a music video montage of shots from the movie, and the actors (most of whom are dead by the time the film ends) grinning and waving guns in front of accelerated shots of Las Vegas.
The soundtrack is weird - the idea (a casino robbery by a group of guys dressed as Elvis during an Elvis convention) is almost too thin for a Saturday Night Live sketch (which, if made, would only feel half as long). It’s White Trash and Two Smoking Barrels, i.e. Demian Lichtenstein saw that movie and said, “neat,” but forgot the part about story, acting, character, or dialogue. So we have some unnecessarily cool zooms and cuts on things that aren’t very important, a precocious child with a future in crime, and Courteney Cox Arquette rethinking her entire career. The high part of the film is Kevin Pollack and Thomas Haden Church as (gulp) Federal agents. That’s all - they don’t actually do anything, but the scenes in which they are allowed to speak are almost as good as a Shannon Tweed film festival.
It’s an indiscriminate little-boy shoot-em up joyride through nothing, culminating in a poorly-executed sort-of movie that also features Howie Long. Why would anyone go to see this film? I saw it, frankly, because it opened. It’s weak. It’s boring. It’s laughably stupid. At times (see aforementioned Church and Pollack, also Jon Lovitz) I thought, “Well, I could give this a Catch It On Network TV rating” which gives no money to the studio but gives you something to laugh about with your friends; the problem is, the networks would cut out the only “good” parts, i.e. the strong violence, the sex, and the cussing. It’s rank and wretched and I have a lot of making-up to do with my companion, who was shaken and angered by the horribly insulting loss of time from his life. And they don’t even go to Graceland. Sheesh!
MPAA Rating R-STRONG violence sexuality language
Release date 2/3/00
Time in minutes 125
Director Demian Lichtenstein
Studio Warner Brothers
