Kevin Costner puts the finishing touches on a major career slump with this ultra-bad crime thriller that would have been passé (and just as ghastly) five years earlier. Positioned as a goofy, comic action flick, 3000 Miles to Graceland is in actuality a soulless, vile enterprise utterly devoid of human feeling or thought, chock full of pointless blood, mayhem, and carnage. The depiction of women is deplorable not just for its archaic reprehensibility but also for its sheer plot-bending senselessness. Example number one: A mother (Courtney Cox-Arquette), characterized throughout the film as loving and attentive, abandons her beloved son with a stone-cold killer for a long section of the narrative, apparently because she finds his taste for waving a gun in her face just ginchy. Example number two: In many a noir crime tale, the central anti-heroes are presented as likable simply by contrast to the sheer villainy and corruptibility of the so-called "ordinary" folks they encounter. In noir, everyone's on the make, a venerable conceit stretching back to Philip Marlowe and Sam Spade. The level of understanding that director Demian Lichtenstein brings to this hallowed device becomes clear in a sequence depicting Murphy (Costner) liberating a teen sex abuse victim from a loathsome gas station attendant. The teen nymphet character is speedily dropped -- in the most sexist, stomach-turning fashion imaginable -- and it becomes clear that Lichtenstein has used a narrative tradition in order to stage a really cool explosion that he can film from a variety of angles, sending the film's already jaw-dropping lack of credibility to new heights. Never has a film worked so hard to be dubbed "Tarantino-esque," but unlike the films of Quentin Tarantino, which are seeped in character and dexterous plot confabulations, music video director Lichtenstein's debut feature is soaked in caricature, twisting like a dying carp all over the literal and figurative terrain of its genre, desperate to introduce some gratifying plot point while never delving deeper into any of its characters than an interstitial cartoon. Moments that are meant to play as sleek and cool, such as a stroll through a casino by Elvis-impersonating rip-off artists (in an umpteenth nod to a scene from 1983's The Right Stuff), fall hopelessly flat, making the film unintentionally hilarious and thereby entertaining in ways never planned by its creators. Virtually unwatchable, 3000 Miles to Graceland is one of the worst films of 2001 or any other year.