The butler did it - or maybe it was the general, the doctor or lawyer.
What exactly the guilty party or parties may have done is something the makers of Basic, opening in town today, try to keep hidden until the film's closing seconds.
Basic is a classic whodunit - shades of Agatha Christie - disguised as a military thriller. If you love a good mystery, you'll have fun following the trail of clues, but if you are looking for a war movie, you'll battle to stay awake.
To the casual observer, ranger drill instructor Nathan West (Samuel L. Jackson) is a hated and hateful man. He pushes his men to excessive physical, psychological and emotional limits that border on torture. The six cadets he takes on a training exercise in Panama at the height of a hurricane warning all have good reasons to want him dead. So do countless people back at the base.
When rescue helicopters spot live gunfire between two of the cadets, they swoop in and rescue Dunbar (Brian Van Holt) and Kendall (Giovanni Ribisi), the wounded buddy he was trying to protect from Mueller (Dash Mihok), who was shooting at them.
Mueller is dead so it's up to Dunbar and Kendall to tell what happened in the jungle to the other members of their party.
Bring in investigators Hardy (John Travolta) and Osborne (Connie Nielsen) who have fewer than eight hours to learn the truth and save the reputation of Styles (Tim Daly), the base commander who sanctioned the training exercise.
Dunbar and Kendall recount entirely different stories so it's up to Hardy, Osborne and the audience to sift through the ramblings and decide how much of each story is true and why the men should be twisting the truth.
The stories are enacted as flashbacks as if they were true, recalling such military thrillers as Courage Under Fire, A Few Good Men, High Crimes and Travolta's own 1999 military murder mystery The General's Daughter.
It's the flashbacks that give Basic its tense action sequences; otherwise it's an intimate drawing room or courtroom drama of discovery.
Writer James Vanderbilt tries to give Basic a new twist every 10 minutes, which means armchair detectives can't zoom out even for a second without fear of losing a clue - or 10. Some of the twists are more obvious than others but none are really that original. In her dozens of whodunits, Christie explored every one of these possibilities.
Travolta's macho swagger is meant to excite as much as annoy Nielsen's tough female soldier. In films like this the protagonists can only hate each other for so long before sexual tensions surface.
Travolta slimmed down, buffed up and waxed his body for this role and these are feats he's determined to emphasize at every possible moment. His Hardy is one proud, grinning, posturing male peacock. Jackson is all barking fury and Neilsen is tough-as-nails efficiency.
As with most murder mysteries, these are caricatures rather than flesh-and-blood people because the plot is far more important than the characters.
John McTiernan, who directed Die Hard and Predator, drenches the screen in pounding rain and keeps his cameras moving at full throttle to suggest more action and pacing than the film really has.
Basic is all about deception and that extends from the characters to the actors and the filmmakers.
The fun lies in allowing yourself to be misled and manipulated, and not trying to impose logic on something that so blatantly disregards it.
(This film is rated AA)
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