Kurt Russell’s Worst Movie, According To Rotten Tomatoes

As far as brief internet research has uncovered, Kurt Russell is the only actor in history to have acted next to Elvis Presley, to have played Elvis Presley, and to have played an Elvis Presley impersonator. The first was in “It Happened at the World’s Fair” in 1963, when the 12-year-old Russell infamously kicked Elvis in the shin. The second was in the biographical miniseries “Elvis,” release in 1979 and directed by John Carpenter. The third, as easily the least popular, was Demian Lichtenstein’s 2001 heist movie “3000 Miles to Graceland,” a largely forgotten and critically lambasted piece of scuzz cinema on the latter-edge of Quentin Tarantino knockoffs. 

And we all likely remember the post-“Pulp Fiction” era with clarity. Many filmmakers tried to capture the flippant violence and ultra-witty banter that Tarantino pioneered, to largely mixed results. “Thing to Do in Denver When You’re Dead,” “2 Days in the Valley,” “Goodbye Lover,” and even “Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels” and “Get Shorty” fall into this camp. “3000 Miles to Graceland” was populated by scummy characters with an unusual job — Elvis impersonation — and staged a sloppy, angry heist movie in the glitzy lights of Las Vegas. Note that “3000 Miles” came only nine months before Steven Soderbergh’s “Ocean’s Eleven” came along and effervescently re-upped the whole genre. 

No one liked “3000 Miles” when it came out, and critics were unkind. On Rotten Tomatoes, “3000 Miles” has a mere 15% approval rating (from 96 reviews), getting pans Stephanie Zacharek, Roger Ebert (who gave it one-and-a-half stars), and the Los Angeles Times’ Kenneth Turan (who gave it one half of a star). As of this writing, it’s the worst-reviewed film in Kurt Russell’s career.

The plot of “3000 Miles to Graceland” isn’t entirely cut-and-dry. Russell plays and ex-con and former Elvis impersonator named Michael who, upon being released from prison, heads to a dumpy motel complex outside of Vegas and seduces a young mother played by Courteney Cox. The following morning, he’s picked up by the scummiest man you’ve ever met, a terrible Elvis impersonator named Thomas J. Murphy, played by a hammy Kevin Costner. There is some mild amusement in seeing Costner playing against his usual affable or upstanding characters, but Murphy is aggressively unpleasant to mitigate any enjoyment. 

Murphy and Michael team up with a rogue’s gallery of criminal helpers played by Christian Slater, David Arquette, and Bokeem Woodbine. The heist goes off very poorly and the Woodbine character is killed in a violent firefight. The rest of the movie will take place mostly back at the dingy motel complex, where tempers flair, suspicions arise, and additional people are shot and killed, all of them bickering over their share of the heist take. Michael, however, appears to be the cleverest of the lot, and seems best prepared to escape unscathed. No points for guessing that “3000 Miles” will end with a hail of bullets from an assembled SWAT team.

“3000 Miles” also pulls an annoying old crime movie trope … twice. There is a scene where it looks as if Michael has been shot to death, only to have him open his shirt to reveal a bulletproof vest. He repeats this dramatically cheap maneuver late in the film. 

I assume producer/co-writer/director Lichtenstein felt the criminal bickering of men in Elvis costumes would be sardonically amusing, but it certainly isn’t. “3000 Miles” is aggressively unpleasant.

Roger Ebert said that “3000 Miles” was “a movie without an ounce of human kindness, a sour and mean-spirited enterprise.” He also pegged the film’s insufferable post-Tarantino leanings, writing: “The plot is standard double-reverse, post-‘Reservoir Dogs’ irony, done with a lot of style and a minimum of thought. It’s about behavior patterns, not personalities. Everybody is defined by what they do. Or what they drive.” 

In her review for Salon.com, Stephanie Zacharek was disappointed by the film’s Elvis-centric setup being used for such an uninspired plot. She is a big Elvis fan, and hated that Elvis was relegated to a background tonal feature instead of a story highlight. “Lichtenstein grooves on bullets and blood and bedlam,” she wrote, “but there’s no grace, no drama, no sense of honor to the violence in ‘3,000 Miles to Graceland.’ It’s a movie barely fit for a cretin, much less a King.” She also agreed with Ebert, noting that the filmmakers were unable or unwilling to give the characters subtle personality, recognizing them only as collections of tropes.

Peter Stack, writing for the San Francisco Chronicle, said that “3000 Miles” was “a tedious caper saga of ultraviolent macho gunk, apparently aimed at pea brains.” He also wrote that “as the Elvis gang gets bumped off, one by one, the movie has to lumber through 90 more minutes — off balance, sputtering, gasping for life.” He didn’t mind much charm in the film, other than a few fleeting moments of Courteney Cox providing some seductive humanity to her role.  

“3000 Miles to Graceland” has undergone no serious critical reevaluation since 2001, and is not the subject of defensive essays from people who loved it as teenagers. This is merely a bad film that even Kurt Russell couldn’t save. Don’t seek it out.