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movie review - Basic

the journal of Michael Werneburg

twenty-eight years and a million words

I'd heard that this was an American take on the Akira Kurosawa flick "Rashomon". I rather liked Rashomon, and thought, "They might have pulled it off despite the dreadful trailers..."

Wrong. So wrong.

I'm a reasonably bright person, and I've rarely come away with a movie thinking 'What the hell?' And when I have, the answers have usually sunk in during the next few hours, or during conversation with friends. A case of the former was "Jakob's Ladder", in which my brother and I worked out - as we crossed the cinema's parking lot - that the whole thing was the fevered imagining of a dying soldier in Vietnam. An example of the latter was "The Ninth Gate", into which I simply read too much to catch the relatively straightforward ending.

Anyway, it's been 12 hours since I saw "Basic", and my estimation of the film continues to slide. For while this movie was fairly well executed, and certainly leads a merry chase in a strange plot involving drug trafficking in Panama's (now defunct?) 'Canal Zone', it has a crucial failing. For a movie that's all about plot, the plot of this movie simply can't be pieced together. And by that, I don't mean to say, "In my estimation there are problems with obscure elements of the plot". I mean, there are basic flaws that start to become apparent at about the 1/3 mark, and become more and more problematic until the final threads holding the seams together get sliced open in the final, unnecessary denouement.

And still, I give it marks for being an entertaining attempt, and certainly a decent change from the usual pacing of such flicks. Also for the very un-American characterization that happens in fits and starts throughout.

Not recommended.