Basic (March 26/03)
Basic marks John McTiernen's first film since the colossal flop, Rollerball. And the ironic thing is, Rollerball was just a little bit better than this.
It didn't start out that way, though. Basic has a heck of an opening half hour. John Travolta stars as Tom Hardy, a DEA agent who's currently being investigated for bribery when he's asked to assist with an interrogation at a military base. It seems as though something went very wrong during a routine training exercise, resulting in the deaths of five soldiers and their commanding officer (an unforgiving man named Nathan West, played by Samuel L. Jackson). Hardy, along with fellow officer Julia Osborne (Connie Nielson), now has to find out the truth about what happened - a task that proves to be a lot more difficult than either of them expected.
The interesting thing about Basic is that it contains one of Travolta's best performances since Pulp Fiction, but the film itself isn't anywhere close to his level. He seems far more relaxed here than he has in a good long while, and for a while, his easy-going charisma and effortless charm propels the story forward - even though the story is dull and derivative. Clad in a tight black t-shirt (how else is he going to show off his newly-toned body?) and sporting a close-cropped hairdo, Travolta's energy is almost infectious; his character becomes someone we want to see more of, but as the machine-like momentum of the plot progresses, his creativity becomes redundant. He soon becomes just another cog designed to service the woefully overcranked storyline, which is (it goes without saying) hardly worth writing about.
Screenwriter James Vanderbilt doesn't seem to care about exploring the various characters that inhabit Basic; he's more concerned with ensuring that there's a twist every 20-minutes or so. Basic is yet another riff on Rashomon, with the two surviving soldiers providing a different account of the same incident. We're not sure who to believe, and indeed, we don't find out what actually happened until the very end. But really, it's impossible to care. The majority of the flashback footage takes place during a stormy night in the middle of the jungle, which means that on a purely visceral level, all of this stuff is just unpleasant to watch. But more than that, the infighting and squabbling amongst the soldiers makes this aspect of the film a chore to sit through. By the time we find out what actually happened, we're so sick of these characters that we wish they had all been killed.
But the interrogation scenes have a certain amount of slick energy to them, due mostly to Travolta's almost over-the-top performance and McTiernen's stylish direction. Still, it's not enough to disguise the script's desperation to keep us guessing; by the time the admittedly unexpected twist ending rolls around, the film's become nothing more than a third-rate Usual Suspects clone.
