BASIC

By: Abbie Bernstein
Date: Friday, March 28, 2003

BASIC is diverting (except for its casual and extraneous homophobia) in a kind of USA cable movie way, watchable but somewhat hamstrung by conflicting impulses. On the one hand, director John McTiernan and writer James Vanderbilt clearly intend their film to be one of those onion skin thrillers, with layer after layer of deception and treachery peeling back to reveal another underneath, until we don't know what (or who) to believe. On the other hand, the filmmakers try a little too hard to make us like John Travolta's Tom Hardy, a former U.S. Army Ranger who's now a disreputable D.E.A. agent. The intent seems to be to keep us guessing, but the emphasis and attitude shift around so much that we are more aware of how the story is being told than actually caught up in the tale itself.

We see an Army Ranger training exercise, conducted during a hurricane in the Panamanian jungle, mysteriously go terribly wrong. Two survivors are brought to a military base hospital, where the officer in charge, Col. Styles (Tim Daly), begs his old pal Hardy to come in to conduct an unofficial investigation/interrogation. This doesn't please Capt. Julia Osborne (Connie Nielsen), who feels civilian Hardy is usurping her job and insists on sitting in on the questioning sessions. It transpires that the Ranger trainees' instructor, Sgt. West (Samuel L. Jackson), was hated by many of his charges. Was the incident a premeditated murder that got out of hand, a drug operation gone bad or something else?

The script

and the characters move us through a variety of scenarios, RASHOMON-style, but the variations lack color, and we never get a sense that a whole lot is at stake. Eventually, of course, events during the investigation heat up, but the different versions of the past never really grip us and make us care which one is true. There's neither a suitable sense of impending doom nor a fascination with discovery the situation is duly odd, but somehow the possibilities never feel very tantalizing. The attempt to have it both ways with Hardy's character we're meant to both doubt and empathize with him seems intended to generate suspense but instead pulls us in two different directions, so that we're neither very scared of nor very fearful for his character.

Even more curiously, despite the bouts of fairly impressive action, BASIC feels like a bottle film. We get several big outdoor setpieces, but the overwhelming sense is that most of it takes place in confined spaces, so that it seems a bit like a transported drawing room mystery.

Travolta has a good time as the swaggering but hip Hardy and Jackson relishes West's beaming abusiveness in the flashbacks. They're entertaining and the movie has its moments, but basically, BASIC keeps us wondering more about what effect the filmmakers are trying for than whodunit and why.

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