Amazon.com
Opening with metallic computer-generated scorpions battling in a scorching desert wasteland, 3000 Miles to Graceland announces itself as one helluva nasty movie. A comedic wallow in antiheroic violence, the movie vomits off the screen, as if director Demian Lichtenstein--obviously a veteran of music videos--had mainlined amphetamines before stepping behind his oh-so-busy camera. In a futile attempt to out-Woo John Woo, Lichtenstein goes to extremes to achieve a kind of absurd in-your-face exhilaration, and for additional thrills, the movie gives second-billing to Kevin Costner in the most vile role of his career. As leather-clad Elvis impersonator and Presley bastard child Thomas Murphy, Costner's like a black-sheep brother to Raising Arizona's biker from hell.
With four accomplices including a fellow Elvis worshipper named Michael (Kurt Russell), Murphy storms a Vegas casino for a $3.2 million robbery that turns into a haywire bloodbath. Partners are eliminated, double-crosses abound, and Michael connects with a trashy sexpot (Courteney Cox Arquette) whose preteen son (David Kaye) is a precocious criminal in training. Murphy's on their trail, FBI agents are on Murphy's, and gradually things get really nasty. We're supposed to laugh at the blackness of it all, and sometimes the ballsy humor scores a bull's-eye. The road-movie action accommodates several twists of plot, and while Russell's enjoying a semireprise of his performance in John Carpenter's Elvis, there's something perversely thrilling about Costner's deadpan ruthlessness. But really, how amoral can one movie be without wearing out its welcome? Frenetically depraved, 3000 Miles to Graceland is like exotic roadkill: morbidly fascinating until you get a whiff of its stench. --Jeff Shannon
