Enter Demian Lichtenstein. Four years after his spectacular success with Lowball (no, I hadn't heard of it, either), he's back with Graceland, the story of five Elvis impersonators and a former defensive end who rob a Las Vegas casino. Their leaders are Michael Zane and Thomas Murphy, played by Kurt Russell and Kevin Costner.
The movie opens outside Vegas, which is hosting the International Elvis Convention. Up drives Mike (Russell) in a blood-red, 1959 Cadillac, the getaway car of choice among career felons. He stops at Rosewood's "Last Chance" motel, where he meets 10-year-old Jesse, his mom Cybil (Courtney Cox), and her boobs. He and Cybil share some sparkling repartee, and before you can say, "Sure, your kid can watch," they're slamming the headboard and sweating over each other in the most touching onscreen coupling since Cary Grant and Deborah Kerr.
This tender moment ends when Murphy (Costner) arrives with his entourage of fellow Elvis impersonators, Christian Slater, David Arquette, and Bokeem Williams (as Franklin, the token black Elvis). They drive to a nearby airport where they meet Jack (former football player Howie Long, who can act almost as well as Dustin Hoffman could play defensive end for the Raiders). Jack outfits the gang with weapons that I'm quite sure aren't legal for felons (or most armies) to possess.
Time for the heist. The five Presleys cruise into a Vegas Casino. Mike is a passable King, but Murph (Costner) is about the saddest looking Elvis ever to walk the Strip, sporting sideburns the size and shape of Florida. Mike commandeers an elevator using electronics skills he honed in the Joint, while the other four break into the vault room, which is protected by a Dexter house lock. (I guess they should have put one of those door chains on the inside.)
After taking the money, the brazen gang runs afoul of a security guard who decides he can take five men with automatic weapons. He yells at them to freeze, realizing moments later he should have first drawn his gun.
Well, the lead starts a-flyin'. Firing off more rounds than were expended in taking Normandy, Murph and buddies kill a pile of cops and security guys, plus a few innocent bystanders (including a midget Elvis), while the good guys run blindly around shooting the walls. Inadvertently, one of the gang does get mortally wounded--the black guy, if you can believe that. They flee to the roof where Jack picks them up in a helicopter and carries them to safety, except for Franklin, whom they tenderly "bury at air."
Back to Mike's hideout at the motel. An argument breaks out when Murph insists the dead guy gets to keep his cut (don't ask me). Christian Slater pulls a gun on Murph, but decides to trust this obviously insane homicidal maniac--especially after threatening him--and holsters it. Murph shows his appreciation by blowing off Slater's kneecap and frontal lobe.
Hiding the money where no one except Cybil's son Jesse could ever find it, they head out to the boonies to bury Slater, but that wild 'n crazy Murph shoots both of his surviving partners and steals Mike's Caddy.
On the way back, some Plot Convenience coyotes cause Murph to wreck, enabling the not-dead-yet Mike (he was wearing a bullet-proof vest, you see) to beat him back to the motel. Cybil has been looking for a role model for her son, so she hooks up with the violent felon, and the three take Grandma's Plymouth and "head for the hills" with the loot.
Now we meet the U.S. Marshals assigned to the case. Tommy Lee Jones was unavailable, so we have Thomas Haden Church, the mechanic from Wings who works in Hollywood under a restraining order to stay 100 yards away from all emotions. His partner is Kevin Pollak, a great comic actor. Unfortunately, his character is supposed to be a tough, bad-ass Federal Marshal. (Picture Drew Carey as the Terminator.)
Murph recovers from his coyote death-match and drives off in search of Mike and family (and the 3.2 million dollars). Along the way, he meets a gas station owner who stops screwing his granddaughter long enough for Murph to kill him. The girl wants to tag along with her lover's murderer (who wouldn't?), and Murph accepts. Since he's laying low from the cops, Murph blows up the gas station, which turns out to be the Western United States' Repository for Nitroglycerin. Minutes later, they are surrounded by motorcyclists, and Murph gives the girl to one of them (an old buddy) despite the fact she hasn't even finished her blowjob. Now that's friendship.
Let's fast-scan (I wish I had!): Murph finds them and kidnaps Cybil. Both he and Mike get caught and are thrown in adjacent jail cells. Mike makes bail (since as a parole violator he's not a flight risk) and he and Jesse find Cybil and the money in the trunk of the Murph's Cadillac. I guess the Boise cops saw no reason to search it. Nor did they bother asking Murph for ID or fingerprint him, or check to see if the feds had a warrant out for any mass murderers driving red '59 Cadillacs. So Murph also makes bail and heads off in hot pursuit driving a stolen wombat van (don't ask).
Of course, his task is hopeless. Mike and Cyb have dumped the Caddy, gotten a non-descript Chevy, and are long gone into the Pacific Northwest. Mike heads for Mt. Vernon, Washington, leaving Cybil and Jesse on their own. After all, there's no way Murph can ever find them.
Unless he just happens to be sitting at an intersection in the middle of nowhere when they drive past. Murph (or perhaps Costner) mutters, "I don't fuckin' believe this!", pretty much in sync with me.
Well, this time he kidnaps Jesse and arranges a swap with Mike at a warehouse near Seattle. He gets there early to meet Jack, who has robbed Fort Lewis of its entire Special Forces armament and talked Ice Tea off the rap circuit long enough to show up and sneer.
Mike arrives, gets the kid, and double-crosses Murph. Things are about to get ugly when the feds and SWAT team arrive and things get ugly.
The cops and marshals surround the bad guys, then watch with frozen trigger fingers as Murph blows Mike away with a shotgun. The cops eventually remember to shoot, using special ammo that makes their guns shoot fire like flamethrowers. The SWAT team shows nearly as much skill as the casino security goons; they get killed running, they get killed standing, they get killed hanging from the ceiling. Ice Tea, drawing on his experience as a rapper, kills several by himself. Pollak and Church (the Marshals) are there, demonstrating the weakness of the U.S. Marshals' weapons proficiency program. Eventually, they do accidentally get their sights on Murph, but Jack throws himself into the path and a dozen high velocity rounds tear into him and disappear from this universe, as none penetrate to hit Murph.
Things look grim for the villain, but then Ice Tea returns, hanging upside down from the ceiling! He's dangling from a chain attached to a rail; the inverted assassin then swoops across the warehouse like a retarded Spiderman, full-auto rifles blazing from each hand, mowing down cops like so much black-clad barley. Until someone shoots him as he's hanging there, no doubt thinking to himself, "Guess that wasn't such a good idea" (however you'd say that in "rap").
Meanwhile, Mike's body is wheeled outside, past a grieving Cybil and Jesse, where a paramedic says, "I gotta get him out of here!", rushes him into her ambulance, then goes on break.
Now it's just Murph against the entire Seattle SWAT team and Pacific Northwest U.S. Marshalls, or what's left of them. He manages to gun down another bunch before someone mistakenly shoots him. He grabs a belt-fed machine gun and blows up a few cop cars, their trunks unfortunately filled with dynamite.
Ready to die a hero's death, Murph lowers his gun and steps into plain sight. This confuses the cops, who try to vaporize him using their laser pointers. Bored, Murph finally raises his howitzer and lets fly again. The cops reluctantly shoot back. Murph withstands the first hundred hits or so, but eventually dies of lead poisoning.
U.S. Marshal Kevin Pollak, surrounded by a few dozen dead officers and several burned-out cop cars, then turns to his partner and says, "Make sure everybody's all right."
Finally, the ambulance pulls away, and we discover Cybil is driving, not the paramedic. And Mike's alive! (Another bullet-proof vest. He must have a wardrobe full of those babies.)
So once more, the bad guy wins the girl and the money, and we get cheated out of watching several dozen funerals for the innocent fathers, sons, brothers, and husbands who were gunned down along the way.
I must give a special nod to Costner, whom I had written off as a real actor. He really nailed the "bad guy" character by glowering and smoking incessantly, plus throwing in the word "fuckin'" before every noun. Of course, it helped to play a soulless, humorless sociopath. It also didn't hurt to share screen time with such versatile thespians as Jon Lovitz, Thomas Haden Church, Howie Long, and Tracy Marrow (Ice Tea).
I highly recommend the soundtrack. What movie featuring Elvis Presley would be complete without such musical hits as: "Come In Hard," "In 2 Deep," "Angel Dust," "Loaded Gun," and "New Disease"?
Four more vacuums.