I went into “Basic” expecting a lot because it stars big names such as Samuel L. Jackson (“Die Hard: With A Vengeance”, “Jackie Brown”) and John Travolta (“Saturday Night Fever”, “Face/Off”) as well as a having the great John McTiernan (“Die Hard”, “The Hunt For Red October”) in the director’s chair. What I got was in many ways a well-made movie but at script level, it is so overly complex that it makes “Mission: Impossible” look simplistic. “Basic” is an ironic title here.

What happens in this movie is that something goes wrong during a training mission in Panama and an army sergeant named Nathan West (Jackson) along with a few of his cadets go missing. It’s up to ex-army man Tom Hardy (Travolta) and Captain Julia Osborne (Connie Nielsen “Gladiator”) to work out what happened. They interview a couple of survivors and try to see who’s telling the truth. We see a ton of flashbacks (all vastly different from each other) as conspiracy after conspiracy and revelation after revelation keep happening until the last few moments of the movie completely spin you one way and then immediately spin you another. It’s clever in some ways but ultimately leaves you feeling that the guys in the film aren’t very smart because they’ve overcomplicated everything.

Travolta and Jackson worked side-by-side in “Pulp Fiction” but they get little to no screen-time together in “Basic”. They both are good (Jackson is by far the better one of the two though) and so is Connie Nielsen. The other characters are alright but virtually everybody here is a liar and most are double, if not triple, liars so it gets to the point where no of them seem believable as they’re so layered with untruths.

“Basic” has some decent action sequences and it’s intriguing at first but as it goes on, its twists become more and more absurd and wreck the film. Movies such as “Pulp Fiction” and “The Killing” do the interlocking stories well and movies such as “Rashomon” do the whole different stories thing well but “Basic” doesn’t.