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Basic
*
Cinema
Reviews - Week of July 4, 2003
Rated on a 4-star scale. Certificate 15. USA.
98 minutes. Directed by John McTiernan. Written by James Vanderbilt. Starring
John Travolta, Connie Nielsen, Samuel L. Jackson, Timothy Daly, Giovanni
Ribisi, Brian Van Holt, Taye Diggs, Dash Mihok, Cristian de la Fuente, Harry
Connick Jr., Roselyn Sanchez.
"Basic" starts out sort of like
an adult "Lord of the Flies", seems like it's turning into "Rashomon" with
a happy ending and all the while treats the archetypal dark and stormy night
like a brilliant stylistic invention. It's a flawed movie, but being one
of those doesn't make it happy enough, so in the third act, the screenplay
takes an audacious dive into all the stupidity it can think up, and takes
us through not one, not two, but four twist endings that redefine the reality
of everything that went before. The final parts of this movie are the kind
that you'd swear were slapped on by the studio, until you realise the whole
story must have been built around them.
The movie opens with a U.S. military training
exercise on the Panama canal, which quickly goes horribly wrong. Samuel L.
Jackson plays a nutty sergeant who sends his men out into a pitch-black forest
during a tropical storm. Soon, there's firing of live rounds in the wrong
directions, and before you know it, two survivors show up back at camp, one
with horrible wounds, both saying that Jackson and their comrades have been
killed.
John Travolta stars as an old buddy of the base
commander; he's a former army ranger with a crass wild streak and a gift
for making people talk. He teams up with a lieutenant played by Connie Nielsen,
and they start to conduct off-the-record interviews with the men who are
still alive. Stories come out about what happened and when, and there's not
only a lot of confusion regarding the night of the mission, but dirt getting
unearthed about military drug deals, torture, conspiracy, and lots of other
stuff designed to get everyone running around with shocked expressions and
serious tones of voice.
Giovanni Ribisi and Timothy Daly play the rangers
who came back with their heads still attached; their tales don't agree with
each other, but what they both make clear, and we see enacted in dramatic
flashback sequences, is that psychological mayhem has been going on in their
unit for some time, and these unsure young boys and girls should not have
been given guns. Travolta gets impatient with the guy who called him in,
and says of the Jackson character: "You knew what he was about, and you stood
by. It was only a matter of time before someone fragged his
ass."
The questioners go back and forth, and the twisty
turns start revealing themselves (or so we think). The first hour of "Basic"
is reasonably compelling but overplayed: Dialogue is smart and snappy, as
are Travolta's techniques of manipulation, and they would be even more impressive
if the conversation didn't keep stopping to explain and congratulate itself
at the end of every scene. John McTiernan, who once made good movies like
"Die Hard" but now seems more concerned with making very bad remakes of Norman
Jewison films like "The Thomas Crown Affair" and "Rollerball", moves the
action along tightly, and only stops the material from being effective because
he pounds us with too much atmosphere. The photography is washed-out and
grainy in a methodical way, and with obscene amounts of rain tumbling down
through every frame, the movie becomes so over-the-top in terms of mood that
the viewer gets too busy noticing it to actually be absorbed.
My other complaints revolve around the casting:
Travolta is too flashy and loud; his character has so many quirks and sparks
of intelligence that a subtle performance would have got the point across
better by not shoving it in our faces. Nielsen doesn't have any chemistry
with Travolta; their talk involves tough-as-nails flirting, but their eyes
don't, and her Southern accent doesn't sound right. Nor does that of Ribisi,
who crosses the speech of Jeremy Irons in "Reversal of Fortune" with an
impression of Buffalo Bill from "Silence of the Lambs", and comes out with
something weird and disturbing that I think is supposed to sound like New
England, but doesn't.
All these flaws put together aren't enough to
drag "Basic" below two-and-a-half stars. Then comes the ending. That is,
the endings. Anyone who has been going to the movies these past few years
knows exactly the kind of thing I'm talking about, and all I want to know
is, how far can this trend go? In "Adaptation", the brilliant film from earlier
this year whose structure used Hollywood formulas to shove a huge finger
up at them, there is a character writing a serial killer movie called "The
3", about a cop, a killer and a victim who all turn out to be the same person,
and who is all wrapped up in scorpion imagery, and turns out to be eating
his own tail when he discovers his own identity. That idea was supposed to
be a wildly satirical mockery of how ridiculous all these surprise endings
are getting, but I saw a movie last week that basically fit its description,
and now we have "Basic", which for sheer blatancy goes even
further.
Eleventh-hour twists are getting to be the biggest
cliché in Hollywood. On the plus side, they make it indisputably easy
to spot lazy filmmakers and stupid audience members. The bad thing is, they
now make us roll our eyes automatically, and nobody is going to be able to
use them for legitimate dramatic reasons. How many more people would have
liked "Signs" if they weren't sick of movies where everything clicks into
place in the last scene? Would "Seven" get away with its stunning ending
today? Will a single screening of "Basic" go ahead without audiences having
to be restrained from throwing things at the screen?
COPYRIGHT©
2003 Ian Waldron-Mantgani
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