After Kurt Russell and Kevin Costner schemed and competed to put out movie versions of the Wyatt Earp saga in 1993, I was surprised to see them teamed as Elvis impersonators gone bad in the 2001 shoot-em-up/caper/comedy/road flick “3000 Miles to Graceland.” Then again, they double-cross each other about 3,000 times in this movie, so maybe art imitates life. The special effects are horrible (with all the gunplay, too bad the editor wasn’t shot) but the story isn’t half bad. Lots of familiar faces in small roles (Ice T! Paul Anka?). Courteney Cox steals the show as a redneck grifter.
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The one thing I’ve noticed about the last couple of Peter Berg movies is that Mark Wahlberg gets his ass whupped. First “Lone Survivor” and now “Deepwater Horizon” (2016), a retelling of the 2010 BP oil exploration disaster. (Good thing Berg isn’t doing the “Ted” series, otherwise the bear probably would have killed Marky Mark by now.) This one reminded me a little of 1970s disaster flicks (“The Towering Inferno,” “Earthquake”) where chaos is the star and we’re just trying to survive along with all the actors until the end. Things were a lot less gory 40 years ago, though.
For the first half of “The Hateful Eight” (2015) (BTW, I counted nine relatively hateful main characters, but anyway…), there is surprisingly little violence. There is, however, a scene in which bounty hunter Kurt Russell expresses concern that a duplicitous co-conspirator will get jumpy and reveal themselves. The jumpy one turns out to be Quentin Tarantino, who could no longer hold back his violent instincts and unleashes a torrent of blood that drowns what had been a downright Hitchcockian Western mystery. I’m not stupid. I know Tarantino deals in the visceral. But there’s usually a payoff. Here, not so much.
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