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Basic (2003)

Plot: A DEA agent investigates the disappearance of a legendary Army ranger drill sergeant and several of his cadets during a training exercise gone severely awry.

News:

12 March, 2003

The good folks over at Sony were kind enough to send over these clips from the film for your viewing pleasure. They especially recommend the first one.

Clip #1 - Witty Banter

Clip #2 - Baseball

Clip #3 - Just Wait

Clip #4 - Am I Scratching Your Surface?

27 June, 2002

What follows is a less than favorable review of the movie's script. This of course doesn't necessarily mean the movie will be poor. It just indicates that at that stage, the script needed some help. Now on with the show...

Basic Script Review

"Dr. Strangelove here with a review of the script for the new John Travolta/Samuel L. Jackson flick Basic. I'm sorry to say that the script was really disappointing.

You don't have to be a genius to know that John Travolta and Samuel L. Jackson hit the big time (for the second time in Travolta's case) in Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction. I don't have to tell many of you that Pulp Fiction was a great film, but I do have to say that their follow up reunion sucks.

As Roger Ebert stated in his negative review of The Usual Suspects in response to understanding the plot "To the degree that I do understand, I don't care." This is exactly how I felt with James Vanderbilt's Basic. (I did love The Usual Suspect though.) The plot, when not mixed with cliché moments, becomes overly complicated and attempts to save itself with a "blinding revelation" every ten minutes. It's like the end of The Usual Suspects repeated in Rashomon style, every ten minutes. The overlapping voice over of explanation, the differing stories, a weaving of tales all centered around a bunch of cliché and one dimensional characters. It tries to hard to be clever and fails miserably.

The script begins with a military training exercise that goes incredibly wrong. During a hurricane, a bunch of recruits are brought on a training exercise by the legendary Colonel West (Samuel L. Jackson's part), when they return, all but two survive with the military watching as one of their own soldiers shoots another recruit. This is another blow to the reputation of the Marines and the officer in charge, Styles (Andy Garcia) decides he can't brush this one under the rug himself. To help with the investigation, he brings in an old friend and former police officer, Hardy (John Travolta) and a bad ass G.I. Jane in the form of Osbourne (Connie Nielsen). They begin to interrogate their two witnesses and discover they each have differing stories (which we see through flashback), all of which show what a hard-on West was and why everyone had a motivation for killing him. This is all done in a rip off of Rashomon. We hear the testimony of one person, see it in flashback, and while they share some of the facts, the person telling the story always has the ability to manipulate the facts. As one character says:

KENDALL
There are degrees of truth, Lieutenant, always degrees. Things are not always what they seem.

Where Vanderbilt goes wrong is telling us this. Showing is always more powerful than telling. We already know this from the differing accounts, the sweeping under the carpet. It's like A Few Good Men in a For Dummies book form. They have to over explain everything and in the end you get lost in some screenwriter's overly complicated double/triple/single cross. Sure, the revelations are cool, but they make no sense in the character's motivation. They are there to give the audience a big scratching of the head and an "OHHH! He/She did it!"

I don't want to dive much more into the plot, I might expose one of the HUNDREDS of revelations. I'm gonna hit on characters briefly. When I first started reading the script, I had an idea of who Jackson and Travolta would be playing. I got a mental picture and I hated what I saw. I thought I saw Travolta as Style, the military commander (which would have been a good choice, I can't see him as the bad ass cop after Battlefield Earth) and Jackson as Hardy. Hardy, the bad ass cop, seems to be a direct rip off of Jules in Pulp Fiction at times. During an interrogation scene, Hardy comes off cool to the audience by telling Osbourne about the "character in people". This threw me backwards to the scene in Pulp Fiction when Jules and Vincent talk about the character in the pig in Green Acres. Then I found out Jackson was playing West, the bad ass drill instructor. This is a horrible casting choice. Granted, Jackson can be a bad ass, but I cannot see him yelling racial slurs at other black men (as written in the script) or putting himself in such a poorly written script.

I cannot believe such a horrible screenplay has attracted these types of stars (okay, maybe Travolta is a gimme) but Nielsen, Garcia, and more importantly Jackson? Even the director, John McTiernan (Die Hard) is attempting to redeem himself after Rollerball with a project of equal shit. Looking at the IMDB, I can only hope that the co-screenwriter they've brought in to help Vanderbilt has made some changes (or even Vanderbilt himself because the draft is dated from two years ago). I don't mean to knock everything Vanderbilt does, I did find some of the revelations really quite good, but he needs to learn where to stop and quit turning things around, making an unrealistic plot. He has some talent, that much is evident, but he needs to learn control. This being his first screenplay, it is understandable. I can only hope his control sets in before this flick begins shooting.

It's not that this flick won't make money. It's probably going to make a killing. It has great talent attached in the acting (and directing if you look back at Die Hard), it has decent action sequences, and a lot of mystery. But, the plot is nothing special and I believe people grow tired of being old the same thing "murder is basic and the truth isn't always what it seems". Let's find a new formula and move on."

(Review submitted by Dr. Strangelove)

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This site’s design is only visible in a graphical browser that supports web standards, but its content is accessible to any browser or Internet device.

Basic (2003)

Basic Script Review