Phoney flashback filled film is ultimately, one big deception.
These days, CNN is knee deep in war conflict stories, unfortunately, the same can’t be said for Hollywood who has once again churned out military-esque soaked drama-thriller where troops take a licking and big named actors take on challenging roles where they get to bark out a series of car-driving rage of blasphemous commands.
Pitting us in this uncourageous and unimaginative story hole is director John McTiernan who annoyingly accomplishes the task of giving us a gritless thriller that simply follows in the film fashion trends of today. Basic involves a military training operation that goes haywire and the rest of the film elaborates on the original story of the solider who doesn’t want to speak about baseball. Set in the country without any available sunlight of Panama, we are prepped-up for yet another bad-boy interpretation of an outlawed former-military man who knows how to get answers Tom Hardy (John Travolta-Swordfish) who helps out his so-called friend. We come to understand that getting answers to questions is as much of a priority as trying to get the digits of his young assigned assistant Lt. Julia Osborne (Connie Nielsen-One Hour Photo) with whom he drops more than one hint that he might fancy an evening nightcap after the five hour job gets done.
The film then becomes this tiring charade of watching one survivor tell his story of who did what and who killed who, which only contradicts with the following versions of the next set of witnesses. As the number of tales grow, and the motives change from a broad range of interesting subjects of racism, homophobia or drug trade biz, our care for what actually happened in the end fades away.
James Vanderbilt’s screenplay doesn’t work well under a McTiernan guise, character motivations make little sense, the dialogue is pretty lame, and the performance of the supporting cast of players as in Sgt. West (Samuel L. Jackson-Formula 51) and Kendall (Giovanni Ribisi-Heaven) are overplayed and for those who cared there—there are no Vincent Vega and the famous wallet carrying Jules teaming up.
McTiernan’s brings some of his Rollerball film crumbs with him, Basic proves that an infuriatingly cheap, no-payoff ending that nullifies the purpose and the story found within the rest of the film is not a good thing for cinema. The Thomas Crown Affair was a good example of how nuance works in romantic thrillers and Die Hard was enjoyable mindless action feature, so let’s hope that McTiernan gets back to the basics.
