Basic

Starring John Travolta, Samuel L. Jackson and Connie Nielsen

Directed by John… Basic

Starring John Travolta, Samuel L. Jackson and Connie Nielsen

Directed by John McTiernan

“Basic” is one of the most contrived films ever made.

By its end, when it’s finally revealed who actually did wrong, you may not be able to make sense of the explanation – the film becomes so carelessly convoluted – and you almost certainly won’t care.

The film exists just to be shifty. On a certain level, there’s nothing wrong with that because it is a product attempting to deliver a very specific sort of thrill. But there is something wrong with taking the audience for unintelligent wimps primed to swallow a plot twist no matter how devoid of logic it is.

It isn’t even the reunion of “Pulp Fiction” costars John Travolta and Samuel L. Jackson that it’s been hyped as – Jackson’s deceased character inhabits the story that Travolta’s pieces together.

The film begins with six Ranger trainees and their sergeant (Jackson) going into the jungles of Panama during a hurricane on an exercise and only two emerging. Four of the trainees and the sergeant, a brutal and hated man, have apparently been murdered, but the two survivors aren’t offering any explanation. In fact, they’re not speaking at all. So Tom Hardy (John Travolta) gets called in.

Hardy is a D.E.A. agent under suspicion of accepting a bribe, but he’s also a skilled interrogator and ex-Ranger, which gives him some cred with the trainees. He and his leading lady – I mean, he and Capt. Julia Osborne (Connie Nielsen) – wade through several wildly conflicting accounts of what went down in search of the ever-elusive truth. As the plot spirals out of control, the truth, the audience realizes, is ridiculous and unconvincing.

The whole mess makes for a rather unflattering homage to Akira Kurosawa’s “Rashomon,” which originated the multiple-accounts-of-a-crime-build-to-the-truth storyline. This has already been done in a military setting in the far superior “Courage Under Fire.”

Director John McTiernan has a solid resume of action films that includes “Predator” and “Die Hard,” but after this and his previous film, 2002’s “Rollerball,” I think he’s lost it. Is there anyone who can make the action genre work? I ask again, where are you, James Cameron? Oh, you’re making an hour-long documentary about the wreckage of the Titanic? That’s it? After six years? Bummer.