Basic | 
| Director: John Mctiernan
Actors: John Travolta, Connie Nielsen, Samuel L. Jackson, Tim Daly, Giovanni Ribisi
Studio: Sony Pictures
Category: DVD
List Price: $14.94
Buy Used: $0.18
You Save: $14.76 (99%)
New (42) Used (286) Collectible (6) from $0.18
Rating:  136 reviews
Sales Rank: 7896
Format: Anamorphic, Closed-captioned, Color, Dolby, Dubbed, Dvd, Subtitled, Widescreen, Ntsc
Languages: English (Original Language), French (Original Language), English (Subtitled), French (Subtitled), French (Dubbed)
Rating: R (Restricted)
Region: 99
Aspect Ratio: 2.40:1
Number Of Discs: 1
Running Time: 99 Minutes
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1
Dimensions (in): 7.5 x 5.1 x 0.6
MPN: 043396097452
ISBN: 1404902686
UPC: 043396097452
EAN: 9781404902688
ASIN: B00009L1TA
Theatrical Release Date: March 28, 2003
Release Date: July 8, 2003
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Product Description
An ex-Army ranger and DEA agent is brought in to investigate the disappearance of an Army Ranger Drill Instructor and a group of cadets.
Genre: Feature Film-Drama
Rating: R
Release Date: 4-JAN-2005
Media Type: DVD
Amazon.com
If you thought The Recruit was full of surprises, Basic will spin your head around. Assuming that cleverness is its own reward, this military mystery shares many of The Recruit's strengths and weaknesses, offering multi-layered deception as its dramatic raison d'etre. Copping plenty of machismo attitude befitting a semi-effective thriller from Die Hard director John McTiernan, John Travolta stars as an ex-Army Ranger-turned-DEA agent, recruited by an Army investigator (Connie Nielsen) to solve the fratricide of a reviled Sergeant (Samuel L. Jackson) who was allegedly killed while commanding a Special Forces training mission in the hurricane-swept rainforests of Panama. Two survivors (Giovanni Ribisi in a showboat role, and Brian Van Holt) recall the ill-fated mission as the truth unfolds, Rashomon-style, in a series of repetitive flashbacks. Tricky enough to hold one's attention as it grows increasingly irrelevant, Basic is so enamored of its bogus ingenuity that its ultimate twist is a letdown. A second viewing might prove rewarding, if only to confirm that it all holds together. --Jeff Shannon
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| Customer Reviews: Read 131 more reviews...
 Basic listening required June 14, 2009
Alrick Banks (USA)
Basic will not let down anyone who is looking for an action pack movie. It will let you down if you don't pay attention. The movie is full of story line after story line. If you miss one of those story lines you will find yourself pressing the rewind on you video. John Travolta and Samuel L. Jackson do a great job of playing their parts as equal leading roles. This movie is a good one to watch when you have time on your hands at home. Just remember to listen very carefully.
Alrick Banks
[...]
 dvd movie May 8, 2009
Walter King
the movie is a must see...I would have liked to know in advance what regional code it was in.
 A Cool Movie - With Very Certain Caveats May 6, 2009
The Tao of Netflix (Washington, DC)
I really like this movie. I tend to get into military type films, especially modern day ones, even more so on the special forces kind, and even most so on jungle-ish settings (Tears of the Sun). This falls very well in that category, supposedly set in Panama. There are some neat action scenes, but you must be prepared for the fact that this movie will make no sense at all. And that's OK. Its about the scenery, the cool acting, the cool action, etc. Its not that the movie has any David Lynch-esque surreal plots, its just that once you understand what is going on (and the plot twists are a big part of the movie), you'll likely say a very noncomittal, "oh." So enjoy the eye scenery and avoid temptations to treat this like a real movie and make sense of a stupid plot.
Buy this movie October 20, 2008
Katherine Lee (Palatine, IL USA)
This movie was really good. Some people just don't appreciate these types of movies. After reading some of the other reviews, I can understand how some people did not like this movie. Some of the twists and events are fairly farfetched, but all movies are like that. If you go into a movie pessimistic than your bound to dislike it. I did like this movie very much, and I thought it had a lot of qualities that made it a very compelling story. The character played by John Travolta is a quick-witted DEA agent who doesn't follow the rules and is hard on the bottle. His counterpart, the character played by Connie Nielsen, is the exact opposite; a very by-the-book kind of person who never deviates from her objective. Together, they have the task of finding out what happened to a group of army rangers during a training exercise in the jungles of Panama, where only one of them returned. This movie reminded me of Courage Under Fire, another war drama that involves the lengthy investigation of the deaths of soldiers during an unknown event. If you liked Courage Under Fire then you will love Basic because Basic has more action and great actors like John Travolta and Samuel L. Jackson. This movie has so many twists that you have to pay attention to every second of the movie, but that's easy because the movie is so intensely entertaining. You may not get the story the first time watching the movie but the second time you will and you'll be glad you did. Another winning quality of this movie that had me going was the grade-A cast. The entire cast was spot on in the movie and every word and action was totally convincing and compelling. I didn't even recognize one of the actors in the movie until the very end, when she was in civilian clothes. That's how well they were played. Every movie that Samuel L. Jackson is usually good because he is such a unique character and I thought he was excellent in the movie. If you like Samuel L. than you'll like this movie because he acts the stereotype of the sadistic drill sergeant to the bone. Overall I thought Basic was a superb movie with its ridiculous twists and witty remarks. You cannot go wrong renting this movie, and after watching it you will be that much cooler.
Never invade your neighbor September 29, 2008
Jacques COULARDEAU (OLLIERGUES France)
Panama after the Reagan's military intervention. The American armed forces are trying to keep the main passage of south American drug up north to the US under control. But that does not mean it is really what happens. In fact drug is flowing abundantly but not freely. Things have to be organized in the hands of the US citizens here, at least some of them, under a uniform or not. In one of the military special, very special units the sergeant discovers the truth and wants to stop it when on a mission. He will end up dead and several other members too, but the transportation of the drug out of the jungle and onto a plane to the US, along with one of the bodies will nearly succeed, though it will fail because the special agent and the female captain he is teaming with find out some details neither knew that imply the colonel is taking his share to let the drug go through. But nothing is that simple and that captain is going to discover even more and then she will be disarmed - psychologically though not militarily - and the film closes the way it had opened on Ravel's Bolero, that music that is a constant cyclical return of just a few notes. Will she go along with the survivors, and the special agent who seems to be the real coordinator, including of the killing of the sergeant? Difficult to know, though she accepts to eat with the administratively absent ones. It is interesting to go back to these films of an older time. 2003 was the time of another military adventure after a previous one a year before. The film was more or less trying to foresee the future of a military adventure in a foreign country. A real catastrophe because it brings rot right into the deepest inner circle of the republic, the armed forces. Five years later the lesson is clear cut and brilliant. Any military adventure that is based on the invasion of a country in order to bring down the local leader and take him to prison in a way or another for any reason you can imagine, in Panama it was drugs, in Iraq it was weapons of mass destruction, can only end up in rot and a full deception. What did Noriega want to do? Nationalize or take control of the Panama canal? Ronald Reagan when he was the Governor of California said: "the Canal Zone is not a colonial possession. It is not a long-term lease. It is sovereign United States territory, every bit the same as Alaska and all the states that were carved from the Louisiana Purchase. We should end those negotiations and tell the General: we bought it, we paid for it, we build it, and we intend to keep it." When he became the President of the US he toppled Noriega and took control of the canal zone. And in may 2008 the son of the general who nationalized the canal was praised by Bush for all the good work he is doing to develop the canal that is a national enterprise of Panama. You can never stop history. You can slow it down, but not stop it. It will go on in its direction and those who will have tried to stop it and will have slowed it down will also have brought onto the world a dire vengeance. History always has the last word. When you see practically the whole South America in the elected hands of what Ronald Reagan would have called communists you wonder if it was really worth it to invade Panama and to invade Granada and a few other things like that. When we see the Panamanian fiasco thirty years later we can wonder what the Iraqi fiasco is going to be in thirty years. The film is telling us that any invasion of a country produces in the medium run the completely reverse effect than the one expected in the very short run. And in the end it is those who resist the rot, corruption, in other words the innocent, that end up dead in such an adventure.
Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, University Paris Dauphine, University Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne & University Versailles Saint Quentin en Yvelines
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