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75Buy your ticket, sit yourself down, and let ol' John take you for a ride. You'll have a blast.
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70The teasing tale is told with such dispatch it will carry willing audiences along; genre staples of action, macho attitude and corruption through the ranks are delivered intact.
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70This effective, well-paced antimilitary thriller has more conflicting flashbacks than you can shake a stick at.
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63The movie, one of those surprise-twist detective stories, doesn't really stand up to scrutiny in the cold light of the theater lobby.
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58Basic essentially is a fun movie, surprise ending and all. To take it too seriously is to miss the point. Travolta is charming, his performance recapturing the old charisma.
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50Their (Travolta/Jackson) teamwork was classic. Basic breaks up the team. What's up with that?
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50Chases its tail for so long, it morphs from a whodunit into a who-cares.
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50Basically, it's a muddle.
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50Just not worth revisiting, unless one wants to tie one's brain into a knot for no discernible reward.
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50The 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. It all feels a little moldy.
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50Comes across as a cheesy, fundamentally unsatisfying experience.
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50Confused, and confusing.
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50So unashamedly confusing, so intent on piling twist upon twist upon twist, it makes your head hurt just trying to figure out what's happened.
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50Entertainment more suitable for the living room than the movie theater.
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40As the mismatched interrogators, Travolta and Nielson seem to be in two different and incompatible movies.
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40Travolta’s performance in Basic is irritatingly familiar to his overacted, spastic performance in "The General’s Daughter." Either that, or he’s channeling Nicholas Cage from “Face Off” again.
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40Those expecting a reunion with Jackson, Travolta's “Pulp Fiction” co-star, should be prepared: They don't interact at all, which is a bit like casting Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers and not letting them dance together.
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40For twists to work, viewers have to feel like they're being led along, not jerked around, and James Vanderbilt's script eventually devolves into little more than a series of jerks, stopping short only of introducing evil twins and alien interlopers.
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38An overly convoluted, tiresome mystery that exists primarily to antagonize the audience, Basic consists almost entirely of dense exposition, then concludes by laughing at anyone who tried to pay attention.
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38Travolta is the least of the film's problems. With a script by James Vanderbilt, whose first credit was for a movie about the tooth fairy ("Darkness Falls"), and directed by John McTiernan, last seen struggling with "Rollerball," Basic is a fundamental failure.
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38Falls flat on two fronts: It's neither deep and interesting enough to be a brainteaser nor sufficiently thrilling to count as a mindless diversion.
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38When the film stumbles to its last and silliest conclusion, you realize much of the plot line was unnecessary -- or couldn't have happened at all!
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30They made a movie without one basic ingredient: the story.
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25With style and energy from the actors, with every sign of self-confidence from the director, with pictures that were in focus and dialogue that you could hear, the movie descended into a morass of narrative quicksand. By the end, I wanted to do cruel and vicious things to the screenplay.
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25Travolta and Jackson have some effective scenes, but Nielsen is lacking in charisma, and James Vanderbilt's screenplay ought to be court-martialed.
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25Another depressingly empty action thriller.
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25Insipid, overcooked and dull.
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20It begins in a muddle and ends in confusion.
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20Watching a movie should never be such torture.
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20You might be tempted to say, "Huh?" Or, if you're in the theater, to leave. But wait -- there's less.
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10Such confusion makes the script-flipping finale something of a respite, as it gives one an excuse to forget everything that's happened.
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10I must confess that I was outsmarted by the ending, but by that time my brain had been bludgeoned into a state just north of stupor.
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0Basic really brings to mind a Travolta film from 2000, "Battlefield Earth," in that it's so astonishingly awful it becomes a sort of kinky pleasure; just when you think Travolta has fallen to the bottom of the barrel, he pulls out a shovel and dons his miner's helmet to see what lies beneath.
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User score distribution:
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Positive: 7 out of 28
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Mixed: 4 out of 28
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Negative: 17 out of 28
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5
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EmilyA.8
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DonnieB.9