Basic Review
by Jonathan F. Richards (moviecritic AT prodigy DOT net)April 2nd, 2003
IN THE DARK/Jonathan Richards
BASIC
Directed by John McTiernan
Rated R, 95 minutes
"Basic" promises the long-awaited reunion of "Pulp Fiction" costars John Travolta and Samuel L. Jackson. Promises, but does not deliver. With the exception of one short and confusing scene, the only time Jackson and Travolta meet is in the credits.
The problem with this military whodunit is that it promises so much and delivers so little. Or maybe the problem is that it delivers too much. It sets itself up to be a clever, plot-twisting brain-teaser, but its twists and its self-absorbed cleverness get the better of it, and it winds up spinning itself to death. The empty cleverness starts with the title - this move has nothing to do with basic training, and the title is there to remind us how far from basic this convoluted story is.
There's a certain sense of déjà vu about a lot of "Basic". It walks in the footsteps of "The Usual Suspects" and that film's philosophical ancestor "Rashomon", the Kurosawa classic about a crime remembered unreliably and differently by four eyewitnesses. The cast has a revisited feel - Travolta is back in his "General's Daughter" milieu, Jackson is back in uniform, and Connie Nielsen tries her best to create some distance from the virtually identical role she played in the just-released "Hunted" by working in a Southern accent, which she doesn't always remember to do.
The movie opens in a hurricane. A helicopter is carrying Sgt. West (Jackson) and his group of six U.S. Army Ranger candidates into the Panama jungle on a training exercise ("Rangers do not wait on good weather," West shouts with a sadistic grin.) Jackson gets a lot of lines in this opening scene, but you can't understand any of them because of the helicopter and the hurricane. When nobody shows up at the rendezvous point, Col. Styles (Tim Daly), the base commander, helicopters out to find the trainees and discovers two of them shooting at each other, a third being carried like a sack of bloody potatoes, and the rest missing and presumed dead.
The survivors won't talk to rookie Army interrogator Lt. Julia Osborne (Nielsen), for reasons never quite explored. Dunbar (Brian Van Holt) says he'll only talk to a fellow Ranger, so (maybe the ones on the base are all dead) Col. Styles reaches off the reservation to his old pal Tom Hardy, who has long since left the military and is now a D.E.A. agent in New Orleans under suspicion of taking a bribe. But he does have a Ranger tattoo on his shoulder, and a winning way with an interrogation. He accepts the assignment, which gets Julia to sputtering "This is highly irregular" until he wins her over with some full-speed-ahead flirting.
Dunbar finally loosens up under Hardy's Ranger-buddy questioning, and tells his story, which we see in flashback. Then from his hospital bed fellow-survivor Kendall (Giovanni Ribisi) tells a conflicting story, also seen in flashback. Then another flashback as Dunbar revises his story. Even if the stories were all the same we wouldn't have any idea of what was happening, because with the driving rain and the hurricane winds we can't hear anything they're saying, and in the semi-darkness we can't tell who's who. As it turns out, even the characters themselves aren't really sure.
But for a while we don't mind. Travolta, for all his poor taste in scripts since his cinematic rebirth in "Pulp Fiction", still has the larger-than-life charm of a classic movie star. Flexing his muscles and flashing his bad-boy grin, he can take our minds off the shortcomings of story and carry us along for the ride for longer than the material has any right to expect. Jackson doesn't get to add much, but we've seen him do this stuff before, and we get the idea fast. Nielsen is a good actress, and tries her best to keep up, but it's too much for her, and she sinks beneath the surface, especially after she has to endure a fight scene with Travolta that should have had her calling her agent. Ribisi seems almost to be playing a dual role, one in the jungle and one in the hospital bed, where he goes so over the top he ends up doing an impression of "The Exorcist".
But the true culprit here is not the acting, nor the dialogue, nor even John McTiernan's energetic direction, none of which would be totally incongruous in a better movie. It is in writer/co-producer James Vanderbilt's obsessive concept, which is so hell bent on tricking us at every turn that it finally staggers through the streets of New Orleans to a twist of an ending that hasn't earned its place at the table. When trickery isn't supported by logic it's like a bore at a party, posturing and full of itself, saying look at me; but we've seen enough.
Originally posted in the rec.arts.movies.reviews newsgroup. Copyright belongs to original author unless otherwise stated. We take no responsibilities nor do we endorse the contents of this review.
