The King of Rock and Roll, Elvis Presley, is dead. At least at the movies thanks to the terrible new action flick 3000 Miles To Graceland. An excessive, violent, loud and stupid beyond belief movie that will appeal only to those fresh from a lobotomy, 3000 Miles To Graceland is the Battlefield Earth of the action genre.

The plot centers around two ex-convicts, the vicious Murphy (Kevin Costner) and the somewhat more benign Michael (Kurt Russell). Along with a gang of three other guys (Christian Slater, Bokeem Woodbine and David Arquette), the two plan on robbing a Las Vegas casino during an Elvis Impersonator convention. Dressed as Elvis Impersonators, they carry off the robbery, but not before piling up about several hundred (and one Elvis Impersonator midget!) cops and innocent people during their escape.

Afterwards, there is some arguing about dividing up the loot, which is just the thing Murphy needs to knock everyone off and keep the loot for him. But, Michael survives, and with a mother (Courtney Cox-Arquette) and her son (David Kaye) in tow, Michael races off up north to launder the money before Murphy can catch up to him.

The above paragraph sums up both the plot of the movie, and the film's first thirty minutes. For the next one hour and forty minutes, we get a loud, long, ridiculous chase movie that is about as exciting as two people chasing each other cross country on mopeds. Director Demian Lichtenstein, another music video moron turned "filmmaker", thinks that excess is intensity.

Wrong. Demian, turning up the volume, editing each scene so they don't last longer than five to ten seconds and using every annoying camera trick in the book doesn't make you the heir to the Oliver Stone/Quentin Tarantino throne. It just shows that you have no idea how to make a movie of your own, just copy others and slap your name on it.

As for Lichtenstein's screenwriting talents (he co-wrote the film with Richard Recco), they suck just as much. Every character is odious and clichéd (I kept hoping that Murphy would knock off that obnoxious kid, just so we wouldn't have to listen to him anymore), the situations are ridiculous, the Elvis concept is woefully underused, it's incredibly misogynistic and the humour to offset the rampant violence (which makes Hannibal tame in comparison) is about as funny as a tax audit. If these are the type of screenplays making it to the big screen these days, I say bring on the strike!

I wish I could say that I felt sorry for Kurt Russell and Kevin Costner, but after all, they did get paid to make this. No one forced them to star in it (As a matter of fact, each of them did take their best shot at editing this movie. God only knows whose cut this is.). Russell, who made for a damn fine King Of Rock and Roll in the 1979 television film Elvis, looks lost here.

Costner hams it up, but to no avail (one positive note: he didn't attempt an accent here.). Courtney Cox, completely miscast here, looked like she discovered eating since her last screen appearance (in last year's Scream 3). As for Slater, Arquette and Woodbine (as the other members of the robbery gang), their screen time is so limited that if you blink, you might miss them.

3000 Miles To Graceland is a film that should have been quietly put on the shelf at Warner Brothers and left to collect dust. This is the type of crap that usually comes out the week after Labor Day when no one goes to the movies, so the loud thud it would create wouldn't be noticed too much. Elvis has left the building, and he took any chances this piece of garbage had of being viewable with him.

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