It is pretty "twisted", confusing, takes the longer route to get to the point.
It excited me anyway.

Cheesier than a bath of Brie and twistier than an eel in a bucket of snot.

Me and my beer don't care.

We like it that way.

CLUE-AH

One of the last beautiful A-list Hollywood twist factories, The Usual Suspects in the army, a combination that might not work without John McTiernan at the wheel making this look and move as good as possible. I've awarded this an extra half-star for the amazingly cool couple minutes towards the end of Connie Nielsen stalking her quarry, the only time this movie actually shuts up and lets the images do the talking. Nielsen has a great off-kilter anti-romantic chemistry with John Travolta, who really ought to be recognized as one of the great movie hams. The fact that I'm not sure what actually happened is, of course, irrelevant.

Danny Zuko is an egg with a beard now

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"So pretty. So dead."

McTiernan, I love you.
But this is not the Jules & Vincent reunion I was hoping for.

Um whodunit que flerta com o abismo a todo instante, em que a narrativa é demolida e reerguida quase que plano a plano. Em sua obra-prima, McT forja uma exuberante contaminação entre corpos e cenários, com gestos e diálogos sendo entrecortados por rajadas de luz, trovoadas e uma porção de sons e frames caóticos -- no QG e lá fora, na selva do Panamá, chove como nos tempos de Noé. Eis o resultado: um filme que ousa entreter não pelas reviravoltas, mas pelo fluxo incontrolável de imagens faiscantes e ruidosas, criando uma sintonia com dois dos temas mais caros ao diretor: o primitivismo e o controle que a natureza (e nós, por extensão, no papel de meros povoadores desse planeta) exerce sobre a vida.

With this director and these two stars attached, "Basic" was pretty underwhelming to say the least. It's entertaining and well acted but the mystery is never all that engaging and it's told in such a standard and unexciting fashion. Not even the few action sequences really make an impression. The title describes this one pretty good.

A surprisingly playful film. John McTiernan revisits some of the territory from his earlier films like "Nomads" and "Predator," only this time in the context of a suspense picture. I wish I found the screenplay more compelling but there's no denying that McTiernan directs the hell out of the material. The filmmaker is at the peak of his visual prowess here, deftly navigating multiple genres and having the foresight to make an extreme close-up out of Travolta's signature smirk. "Basic" winds the viewer up like a spring, setting the audience's nerves on edge, until you arrive at the end and realize McTiernan's only been waiting for you to kick back and have a beer with him the whole time.

Holy shit! I totally slept on this junk back in the day, but when I saw Netflix had it I was like, "Perfect timing. Let's get Basic-ed"
I sat alone on my couch, fired it up and then proceeded to get drunk and marvel at the sheer irrelevance of this thing. Travolta is in top peacocking form here, wearing the tightest fucking shirt I've ever scene and laying down on tables all "cool guy" styles while interrogating suspects. It also has like 7 "twist" endings, each dumber than the last. I fucking loved it.

This is your BASIC great military thriller! Great acting by both John Travolta and Sam Jackson!

i don't know where this trope comes from, but i think i'ts something like sherlock holmes, an investigator being called in a rainy night to an isolated mansion to uncover some mystery. ive just seen a variation of this in Gosford Park some movies back in my diary.

this follows the trope only changing the context, and i love movies that do this.

John McTieran's last film since his legal issues and thus was sent to prison, blacklisting him forever. Either way this is an outrageous early 2000's crime thriller starring an over the top John Travolta investigating a military training session gone wrong. An equally over the top Samuel L. Jackson plays a sadistic captain as well and the film is edited horribly and has cheesy music. Damnit though if McTieran doesn't know how to shoot a jungle soldier scene. I like it!

This is not a good movie. It tries to be a smart and twisting mystery, but none of it really works.
However, Samuel gets to play a loudmouth hard-ass and John a smug asshole, and I am entertained. This is just stupid fun.

An incredibly dumb movie that makes zero sense and is full of cliches and the worst CGI rain I’ve ever seen......and yet, it’s fun and I like it. And Giovanni is out here just swinging for the fences.

A real mess. I don't know what happened to this one but I'd love to hear what was going on behind the scenes.

Took a break from my LA Crime binge to watch this, because I bought it on Blu-Ray and it finally came in the mail today. Gotta admit I really loved this thing for awhile and I was ready to call this one of Mcteirnan's best, but man that final twist just ruined a lot of my enjoyment for where the film was destined to go. There are so many twists throughout this thing and it's so fun to watch, because it's pretty badass, but the final twist is terrible, and they don't give you much time to process it. It's certainly still a fun watch if you were ever thinking about it. It's actually pretty underrated and really overlooked. It's fun and harmless, but there is enough cool and badassery to justify a watch if you feel like it.

There’s an awful lot of rain in this one.

Oh you like twists, do you? Then why not have all the twists in the world

This almost had too many twists, some of them more confusing than necessary, and definitely felt like a product of it's era.

I wanted so badly to be really invested in this mystery but the poor acting and flimsy story made it hard to do so. To me, it felt as if different parts of the story were competing with each other and so I didn’t know what to believe and sometimes I couldn’t even follow what was happening. A lot of the acting felt very fake, especially from Travolta, Diggs, and Ribisi. This could have been much stronger but I was unfortunately let down.