3000 Miles to Graceland

The last time Kevin Costner tried playing the bad guy in a film, it went over about as well as Squid on a Stick.

Of course, that was way back in 1993 (in Clint Eastwood's "A Perfect World," to be specific), when Costner was still a beloved movie idol. Since then, he's released a string of flops, so you'd guess that America might be ready to accept the newer, meaner Kevin Costner, right?

Wrong. Easily the worst of the many gaffes committed by the makers of "3000 Miles to Graceland" is allowing Costner — an actor who's lost all sense of performance subtleties — to play the heavy of the piece.

Rather than giving Costner a chance to reinvent himself, all this movie really does is give him an opportunity to overact, while the rest of his co-stars — including Kurt Russell — stand around looking bored.

As for the film itself, it's a dark comic thriller that is so big, so loud and so dumb that it would be easy to mistake it for one of Jerry Bruckheimer's pricey productions — except that the movie studio wasn't smart enough to release it in the summer, when something like this is deemed more "acceptable."

The rather low-concept plot follows five crooks — including ex-cons Thomas "Murph" Murphy (Costner) and Michael Zane (Russell) — as they waltz into a Las Vegas casino wearing Elvis Presley disguises and come away with more than $3 million in cash.

However, their "fool-proof" scheme quickly goes awry when one of them is shot and killed. Things go from bad to worse as Murph double-crosses his former partners and leaves them all for dead. All except his former cellmate Michael, who is smart enough to not trust him.

Having already stashed the loot, Michael's hoping to get up to Idaho to have the obviously marked money "cleaned" and then retire on his boat. But there are a couple of complications when he picks up grifter Cybil (Courteney Cox) and her pickpocket son Jesse (David Kaye).

Meanwhile, Murph has survived a mishap of his own and is already hot on their trail, as are two law-enforcement officers (Kevin Pollak and Thomas Haden Church), who are concerned about the pile of bodies left in their wake.

Given the amount of violent, bloody content, it probably would have been inappropriate for the filmmakers to go for a more comic tone, but for what appears to be (at least from the trailers) a cheeky caper movie, this is surprisingly dark and mean-spirited.