Basic: Critic Reviews

You can't handle the truth! -- or more to the point, it's not worth the effort.

Someone decided to put Rashomon in a Cuisinart along with A Few Good Men, The Usual Suspects and A Soldier's Story, and hit the pulverize button while forgetting to replace the top.

The tepid result is like Courage Under Fire without the compelling Meg Ryan angle, or Travolta's 1999 The General's Daughter without the sexual squalor.

Entertainment more suitable for the living room than the movie theater.

The movie is just too busy to be suspenseful.

It's neither deep and interesting enough to be a brainteaser nor sufficiently thrilling to count as a mindless diversion.

Nothing is as it appears, except the fact that nothing is as it appears.

You can fall asleep in the first reel, wake up at the end, and know as much as anyone else.

Basic is too busy changing rules and strutting its cleverness.

A good con game movie follows its own rules and, at least in retrospect, makes sense. Basic changes scenarios every 20 minutes and finally trips over itself.

John Travolta is having fun -- a lot of it -- and that may be all the reason you need to wedge Basic into your post-Oscars film schedule.

By the end, I wanted to do cruel and vicious things to the screenplay.

When you get to the last Basic twist, I doubt you'll feel the movie played very fair with you, or that the situation makes much sense.

Director John McTiernan does a swell job with James Vanderbilt's sneaky script in keeping us guessing.

If we can't trust the narrators of the flashbacks, whom can we trust? Certainly not a director and screenwriter (James Vanderbilt) whose narrative approach is to repeatedly lay down a rug and pull it from under us.

There's no denying the film has a tendency to trip over its own ungainly strides, but it has enough firepower to entertain action fans -- as long as they don't look too closely.

The picture feels far more dedicated to the proposition that a mystery can never have enough twists than it does to plausibility or dramatic integrity. But the teasing tale is told with such dispatch it will carry willing audiences along.

Chases its tail for so long, it morphs from a whodunit into a who-cares.

A Rashomon-like thriller that entertains and challenges you to pay attention, to figure out its plot and to connect its clues.

Travolta is a vital presence that constantly holds our attention, even when the script is threatening to lose it.

This is one of those plot-heavy flicks that topples under its own engorged bulk, leaving logic to suffocate and common sense to go begging.

The latest example of a thriller in which the beginning and the end make at least a tiny bit of sense, but the connecting stuff in between is just an inscrutable muddle of dumb twists, red herrings and ho-hum shockeroos.

The movie is so superficial that, once the mystery has been unraveled, all we do is shrug and walk out of the theater, slightly irritated at the waste of time and money.