John Travolta knows how freaking cool he is. He knows exactly how to turn up the boyish charm laughing loudly, laughing boldly, displaying his perfectly shaped, blindly white teeth, holding his head at a slight angle in his hands, squinting those endlessly blue eyes and command the room.
He knows he’s an icon. He knows that a previous generation grew up on the pulsating, disco-tastic, blue collar splendor of Saturday Night Fever and that the same generation fell in love with him all over again for his turn as an uber-hip hitman in Pulp Fiction. He knows we just want to watch him dance just a tiny bit of doo-wop with Olivia Newton, just a little twist and shout with Uma. He knows that the majority of female moviegoers in the country hell, the world would abandon their jobs, their husbands, their children for the opportunity to pour barbeque sauce on the big guy and work him like a rib.
Unfortunately, he does not know how to pick a film role anymore. He could not possibly understand that we’re running out of excuses for his willingness to play the same dull variant of a slick, control-freak civil servant of some sort. Pick a role, any role: the Warrant Officer investigating a kinky murder in The General’s Daughter, a movie featuring Important Graphic Violence; a galactic warlord (or something) in the embarrassing Battlefield Earth; or even the doughy brand of everyman good-guy in Domestic Disturbance. Travolta’s latest, the psychological-military thriller Basic, proves no exception.
Directed by John McTiernan (the Die Hard series, The Hunt for Red October and last year’s miserable Rollerball), Basic is basically a color-by-numbers amalgam of the last few years of Travolta fare. The big guy plays Agent Tom Hardy, a DEA agent called in by Chief Warrant Officer Pete Wilmer (Tim Daly) to investigate the sudden disappearance of infamous Army ranger drill sergeant Sgt. Nathaniel West (a wasted Samuel L. Jackson). After a top-secret training mission with highly covert Army rangers goes terribly awry, there’s no one else to call but John-John the Phenomenon, anyway.
The unorthodox Agent Hardy he purchases a vending machine doughnut for a weary solider under investigation as a sort of carbohydrate-based, psychological maneuver must learn to work alongside the lovely and ballsy Lieutenant Julia Osborne (played with subtly and smarts by Colleen Nielsen of Gladiator and One Hour Photo).
In a world where every truth has more than one meaning (the tagline for Basic: ‘Deception is their most dangerous weapon’), these two rambunctious kids have to curb their disdain (and sexual tension) to get the job done and solve the mystery.
In a recent interview, Travolta explained, ‘I found that the original writing was always excellent. It was just that everyone was so dirty in the first script. Except Colleen, we were just the nastiest group of guys you’d ever see. But how do you turn it into something like Pulp Fiction, where you care about the characters even though they’re misguided, where you balance the good and the bad? That’s what we tried to do.’
Paging Quentin Tarantino. Paging Quentin Tarantino.
On that note, does McTiernan think he’s kidding us? After a half-hour of Johnny Boy’s standard grinning and grandstanding, you’ll get bored and figure out the paper-thin plot in five minutes. The movie depends on flaky psychological chicanery, and McTiernan heaps on the cheap visual tricks and disorienting flashbacks aplenty.
As if the script didn’t cause enough problems, the setting makes it exponentially worse. The majority of the movie’s essential expository scenes take place in a raging typhoon, creating an impenetrable wall of rain noises. In the flashbacks to the scene of West’s disappearance, the unnatural-looking precipitation distracts to the point of creating an indistinguishable mishmash of dialogue and characters.
The best part? You won’t care. You won’t care about the cardboard cutout figures known as ‘characters.’ You won’t care about Giovanni Ribisi’s character, a gay-soldier-with-something-to-prove whose affected mannerisms make Oscar Wilde seem like an L.A. Raider. And you certainly won’t care about the reunion of Travolta and Jackson, the dynamic duo once brought to you by Quentin Tarantino. You might care, though, that despite the flick’s advertisements that imply a comeback for these old friends, the two don’t even share a single scene.
The most enjoyable moments of Basic are provided by Nielsen, a perennial cinematic bridesmaid who seems way overdue for a coming-out of her own. The audience connects with this icy-yet-endearing beauty who must truly transform to cope with her new partner’s obnoxious style and perceived knowledge of the mysterious goings-on. She knows all too well how cool Travolta is and understands how to work with (and around) the turbo-personality.
Travolta said, ‘Connie was really my match in this film. She was really like her character in so many ways, but the brilliant thing about her interpretation was I don’t know if you’ve seen female military characters but she didn’t have to shed her femininity. She could be powerful and sexy and demanding, all at once.’ With any luck, her involvement in this mess will somehow bring about more demanding roles in the future.
As for you, Mr. John Travolta you should be disappointed in yourself. John, we all know how cool you are. Next time, wait for a good role. It’ll come along soon enough. And maybe next time well, maybe could you dance in your next movie? Just a little?
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