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Overall Rating
 Awesome: 6.76%
Worth A Look: 12.16%
Average: 0%
Pretty Bad: 24.32%
Total Crap: 56.76%
4 reviews, 50 user ratings
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| Basic |
by Erik Childress
"Like Watching Porn In a Bumper Car Without the Payoff"
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Once you’ve seen the ads for Basic, what’s left of the mystery? You’ve got every quote whore from here to Amsterdam telling you about a twist ending that you won’t believe. There’s the line “we’re here, but we’re not here.” And there are three shots from the film’s final five minutes within the commercials. How are we not supposed to guess? Better yet, who the hell cares? Because guess or no guess, the outcome doesn’t make sense and why leave the house when you can get jerked off at home?Reportedly John Travolta and Samuel L. Jackson have been waiting for a script to come along to work together again. You have to wonder if they actually read the script since the film causes them to have zero scenes together. Unless you’ve got the thinking cap theater ushers will try to pry away from you when entering the theater. As Travolta says in the movie, “am I scratching YOUR surface?”
Travolta plays Tom Hardy, a DEA agent hired to investigate a military operation gone wrong under the Snake Eyes Principle. And if you understand the reference, you’re already way ahead of this movie. Seems like hard-ass Army Ranger Drill Sgt. Nathan West (Jackson) may be one of several dead on an impromptu exercise into the jungles of Panama. In the middle of a hurricane, no less. One survivor (Giovanni Ribisi) is laid up in the hospital and the other (Brian Van Holt) is waiting to play a game of Rashomon with Hardy and co-interrogator, Lt. Julia Osborne (Connie Nielsen, joining a list of actresses who should never try to act tough.)
A story is told. And then another and then another. Tales of hatred for the Sergeant turns into yarns about drug dealing and multiple identities until everything comes full circle like the infinity symbol that’s used as a big unsubtle clue. Who looks at that symbol and doesn’t immediately see a figure-eight? And are we so stupid that we needed the magic eight ball balloon at the end? That’s what screenwriter James Vanderbilt is counting on – that you are stupid enough not to notice that while you are being misdirected with lies that will never tie together in any universe. Yes, The Usual Suspects was dependent on a big, fat lie as well, but that lie shows you how it was constructed and adds up in conjunction to all the character’s actions outside of the web of lies.
A top ten list of audience questions of Basic would look something like this: (Spoilers Abound!)
10. How does Connie Nielsen not know the name of the suspect she’s interrogating? (And don’t say dogtags.) Wouldn’t Tim Daly know? (Ok, that’s two questions but every question to be asked of Basic has a subset of infinite questions.)
9. If the so-called elite “Section 8” are maverick ghosts, what are they doing hanging around an Army base?
8. Is Travolta’s behavior during the investigation there for nothing but the sake of winning $10 and exposing Nielsen’s boyfriend so that he can go out with her?
7. Can you really hit someone with a jacket and knock them through a double door on the other end of a hallway?
6. Was the whole deception just an elaborate attempt to offer someone a job?
5. How far has John McTiernan, the once great director of Die Hard & The Hunt for Red October, fallen? (Between this and Rollerball, he’s liable to be passing Gandalf and the Balrog soon.)
4. Is this really the first of at least three movies I may see this year where a character pukes up a gallon of blood? (The other two I’ve seen and will be released later this year. I leave it to you to discover which.)
3. Did we really need to see Travolta’s “butt abs”?
2. With all the bait-and-switches going on, why doesn’t Harry Connick Jr. start singing “It Had To Be You”?
1. Did we just see how the A-Team was formed?If you are able to answer any of those questions then the filmmaker’s have succeeded in getting you to fool yourself. Butt abs notwithstanding, the questions CAN’T be answered within the confines of this screenplay. Any audience can be fooled with lies. A great, twisty mystery takes the awakening of alternate paths like Dead Again or Wild Things that make you go “of course, how did I miss that path” and not telling us about a path that never existed. Surely there are easier ways to expose a drug ring then constructing a story that “needs to be told right.” Basic is NOT that story. It's more like watching porn in a bumper car without the payoff.
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link directly to this review at http://efilmcritic.com/review.php?movie=7382&reviewer=198
originally posted: 03/31/03 07:42:25
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USA
28-Mar-2003 (R)
UK
N/A
Australia
29-May-2003
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