A quick Internet search reveals that Kurt Russell is the only actor in history to have acted alongside 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 12-year-old Russell infamously kicked Elvis in the shin. The second was in the biographical miniseries “Elvis,” which came out in 1979 and was directed by John Carpenter. The third, and by far the least popular, was Demian Lichtenstein’s 2001 gangster film “3000 Miles to Graceland,” a largely forgotten and critically panned piece of smut on the fringes of Quentin Tarantino impersonations.

And we all probably remember the post-Pulp Fiction era well. Many filmmakers tried to capture the flippant violence and overly witty lines that Tarantino once championed, with mostly mixed results. Thing to Do in Denver When You’re Dead, 2 Days in the Valley, Goodbye Lover, and even Jack and Jill and Get Shorty fall into this category. Populated by sleazy characters with an unusual job – impersonating Elvis – 3000 Miles to Graceland was a sloppy, angry heist movie set in the glittering lights of Las Vegas. Note that 3000 Miles came out just nine months before Steven Soderbergh’s Ocean’s Eleven, which splashily reinvigorated the whole genre.

Nobody liked 3000 Miles when it came out, and critics were unkind. On Rotten Tomatoes, 3000 Miles has only a 15% approval rating (from 96 reviews), panned by Stephanie Zacharek, Roger Ebert (who gave it a star and a half), and Kenneth Turan of the Los Angeles Times (who gave it half a star). At the time of this writing, it is the worst-reviewed film of Kurt Russell’s career.

The plot of 3000 Miles to Graceland is not entirely straightforward. Russell plays an ex-con and former Elvis impersonator named Michael who, after his release from prison, goes to a seedy motel complex outside Vegas and seduces a young mother, played by Courteney Cox. The next morning, he is picked up by the meanest man you’ve ever met, a terrible Elvis impersonator named Thomas J. Murphy, played by an over-the-top Kevin Costner. It’s mildly amusing to see Costner play off his usual affable or upstanding characters, but Murphy is aggressively unkind to the point of dampening any joy.

Murphy and Michael team up with a cast of criminal accomplices played by Christian Slater, David Arquette and Bokeem Woodbine. The robbery goes very badly and the character Woodbine is killed in a fierce gun battle. Most of the rest of the film takes place in the seedy motel complex, where tempers run high, suspicions arise and more people are shot, all arguing over their share of the loot. Michael, however, seems to be the smartest of the bunch and the best prepared to escape unscathed. There’s no way to guess that 3000 Miles ends with a hail of bullets from an assembled SWAT team.

3000 Miles also uses an annoying old crime cliche… twice. There’s a scene where Michael looks like he’s been shot, only to open his shirt to reveal a bulletproof vest. He repeats this dramatically cheap maneuver later in the film.

I assume that producer/co-writer/director Lichtenstein found the criminal bickering of the men in Elvis costumes sarcastic and amusing, but it’s certainly not. 3000 Miles is unpleasant in an aggressive way.

Roger Ebert said that 3000 Miles was “a film without a shred of human kindness, a bitter and mean endeavor.” He also criticized the film’s unbearable post-Tarantino leanings, writing, “The plot is the usual double-inversion, post-‘Reservoir Dogs’ irony, with plenty of style and a minimum of deliberation. It’s about behavior patterns, not personalities. Everyone is defined by what they do. Or what they drive.”

In her review for Salon.com, Stephanie Zacharek was disappointed that the film’s Elvis-centric setting was used for such an unimaginative plot. She is a huge Elvis fan and hated that Elvis was relegated to a background sound feature rather than a highlight of the story. “Lichtenstein plays with bullets, blood and mayhem,” she wrote, “but the violence in ‘3,000 Miles to Graceland’ has no grace, no drama, no sense of honor. It’s a movie hardly fit for a cretin, let alone 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, a writer for the San Francisco Chronicle, said that 3000 Miles is “a boring hustler saga full of ultra-violent macho blather, obviously aimed at small brains.” He also wrote that “as the Elvis gang is killed off one by one, the film still has to slog through 90 minutes – off-kilter, stuttering, struggling for its life.” He did not find the film particularly charming, except for a few fleeting moments in which Courteney Cox brings some seductive humanity to her role.

3000 Miles to Graceland hasn’t been subjected to a serious critical reappraisal since 2001, nor has it been the subject of defensive essays by people who loved the film as teenagers. This is simply a bad movie that not even Kurt Russell could save. Don’t look for it.