In their first on-screen reunion since their Oscar-nominated performances in "Pulp Fiction," John Travolta and Samuel L. Jackson co-star in the thriller "Basic."
An ever-widening mystery surrounding the disappearance of a group of elite commandos draws in ex-Army Ranger-turned-Drug Enforcement Agency Agent Tom Hardy (Travolta). One of the missing soldiers is the feared and despised Sgt. Nathan West (Jackson), whose Special Forces trainees have been lost during a routine training exercise in the jungles of Panama.
Lt. Julia Osborne (Connie Nielsen) leads an investigation of two returning soldiers, neither of which is willing to cooperate. As she peels away layers of intrigue, revealing more lies and greater deception, Osborne and Hardy inch ever closer to the horrible fate of the missing rangers.
Key events from the story are depicted in flashbacks, showing subjective perspectives of each character. Since at least some, and possibly all, of the narrators are unreliable, it is impossible for the audience to tell what's real and what isn't.
But the "basic" problem is that viewers won't care.
There comes a point when audiences will realize the movie is exclusively concerned with playing games with its viewers, and the screenwriting isn't clever enough to make it worthwhile. The more convoluted the events become, the more interest wanes. The movie is so superficial that once the mystery is unraveled, one is left with the feeling of having wasted both time and money.
The acting in "Basic" is uniformly uninspired. Jackson phones in a performance of his characteristic tough-guy, and there's nothing new or interesting about his shouts, rants and profanity.
Nielsen's performance is the worst of the film. The more serious the scene, the more she tries to act like Travolta. She's an incongruous character with a tough skin but a vulnerable underbelly that's pathetically easy to expose. Osborne's poor investigative instincts and on-again, off-again Southern twang are her most irritating traits. She does not act - she simply speaks her lines with minimal feeling and emotion.
As Hardy, Travolta is the movie's only saving grace. We first see him singing in a seedy Panama hotel bathtub shower. He pulls away the curtain and barely drapes a towel around his waist. Grabbing a beer, he confidently sashays to the room's balcony, where he chats up the working girls downstairs. It's clear from the start that "Basic" will be about Travolta's ability to seduce and how that translates to Hardy's character.
Travolta's performance is a narcissistic one, but it is hypnotic as Hardy primps, poses, reclines and smokes. Hardy seems written precisely to exploit Travolta's easy bravado. While the other characters simply recite their lines, Travolta actually performs.
For director John McTiernan, it's unlikely that "Basic" will reverse the free-fall of his career. The director, once revered and respected for making the top-notch thriller "Die Hard" with the then-unproven Bruce Willis in the lead role, has ended up toiling in dead-end productions like "Rollerball" and "Basic."
Incapable of being anything more than extraordinarily stupid, the only up side of "Basic" is that it bucks the current trend in military films by making up an incident instead of mining historical events for material. While it seems geared to ensure notice for its principal cast members, this glossy prestige piece doesn't really make any sense.
Anyone who doesn't pay attention, enjoys preposterous thriller-like plot twists and yearns for lots of scenes filmed in the rain will find that "Basic" hits the spot.
Everyone else will find this movie to be tiresome and utterly forgettable.
Photo: Meredith Forrest Kulwicki
