The hype machine promoting Basic -- a U.S. military mystery thriller -- boldly makes a claim for the heroes and/or villains in the flick: "Deception is their most dangerous weapon."
By the end of John McTiernan's movie, however, you might think that stupid lies and inane treachery are the real weapons of choice. Deception sounds too clever, too sophisticated.
The timing is also bad for this movie. It makes the U.S. Army look like a cesspool of corruption. Given the current events in Iraq, that may not be the message people want to hear at this time and this is not the kind of escapism people who are overloaded on war imagery will want to see.
Don't blame the star actors, not in this case. They're stuck with John Vanderbilt's screenplay and, of course, could not have foreseen the Iraq war. So John Travolta, Samuel L. Jackson, Connie Nielsen and a ragtag bunch of support players, including a snivelling Giovanni Ribisi and a slick-sleazy Harry Connick Jr., do a decent enough job creating characters.
McTiernan also does a decent enough job in the shoot on location in Panama and Florida, making Basic at least look like a major league project.
It is also a wet jungle movie -- no one has seen this much rain on screen since A Perfect Storm -- so there is atmosphere. Something interesting might unfold.
What does happen is trickery. You cannot believe anything you see on screen. An "incident" involving gung-ho army Ranger Jackson, and his team of elite trainees, has led to a military investigation headed up by Travolta and Nielsen, who naturally indulge in a little romantic frisson.
As the story unfolds, different versions of the "incident" are recounted by characters. The true story is not pieced together until the final scene. Oops! Bad mistake. I just didn't give a toss by then! What unfolds is so unsatisfactory, at least for anyone who has seen any of Alfred Hitchcock's best movies, that Basic is just base.
The trouble is content, not style. The deliberately convoluted plot, which only postures as Hitchcockian, is actually so simple-minded when unravelled that it holds no real mystery. There is no pleasure in sorting out the lies from the truths.
Hitchcock classics such as Vertigo, Rear Window, North By Northwest, Rope, either version of The Man Who Knew Too Much and a dozen others are so vastly superior to this mediocrity that it looks like the people who conjured up Basic have no sense of what has gone before and what needs to be done to create that particular kind of movie mystery plot. Here it is all mechanical, an exploitation of audience, instead of the exploration of intrigue that Hitchcock perfected.
As for interviews during which the filmmakers have cited Akira Kurosawa's 1950 Japanese classic Rashomon -- a stunning film showing what happens when a crime is re-created from different perspectives -- that is just preposterous. In the end, the hype-masters here just deceive themselves -- and people who pay to see what is just Basic nonsense.
(This film is rated AA)
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