My World of Flops Basic-Ass Entertainment for Dads Case File #185/The Travolta/Cage Project #68
The Travolta/Cage Project is an ambitious, years-long multi-media exploration of the fascinating, overlapping legacies of Face/Off stars John Travolta and Nicolas Cage with two components: this online column exploring the actor’s complete filmographies in chronological order and the Travolta/Cage podcast, where Clint Worthington, myself and a series of fascinating guests discuss the movies I write about here.
Read previous entries in the column here, listen to the podcast here, pledge to the Travolta/Cage Patreon at this blessed web address and finally follow us on Twitter at https://twitter.com/travoltacage
When I worked at The A.V Club it was exceedingly common for commenters to wonder aloud why, for the love of God, a respected and prestigious actor that they absolutely adored was in a terrible-looking movie. Weren’t they better than that? Didn’t they have more integrity than to prostitute themselves for fat-pocketed, sausage-fingered vulgarians unworthy of their genius?
The answer, then and now, is that actors act. That’s what they do. That’s how they earn their livelihoods. It’s not just what they write down as their occupation on their taxes, it’s who they are on an existential level as well.
A working actor works. Seemingly no one works more than Samuel L. Jackson, a fierce contender for James Brown’s vacated throne as the hardest working man in show business.
Jackson clearly loves to work. You don’t get to be the top-grossing actor of all time by not working. No, you win that impressive yet somewhat dubious title by making 138 movies, many of them Marvel.
The Oscar-nominated star of Pulp Fiction is obviously not someone who waits around for material that speaks powerfully to him as an artist or a human being and you can only work with Quentin Tarantino every so often.
Jackson is going to say yes to a nice paycheck whether the material is worthy of him or not. He doesn’t seem like the kind of guy who bothers watching all, or even most, of his movies. I can’t imagine him being particularly heartbroken if the Saw movie he did with Chris Rock or the one where he yelled “I have had it with these motherfucking snakes on this motherfucking plane or the totally x-treme James Bond knock-offs he did with first Vin Diesel and then Ice Cube are warmly received or fondly remembered.
It’s clearly all just work for Jackson. That’s what Jackson is doing in 2003’s Basic: acting. But he’s also clearly having a goddamn ball being Samuel L. Jackson to the Nth degree, Samuel L. Jackson to the infinite power.
Basic isn’t much of a movie. It’s a glorified airport paperback of a mystery, the kind of thing ideally consumed on an airplane where its only real competition is thumbing through a copy of Skymall.
You will SEE things on PLANES. Things like SNAKES.
In that context you don’t choose to see Basic because it is a particularly promising or memorable or even engaging motion picture but rather because it’s a MOVIE and experiencing literally any work of cinema, no matter how minor or disposable, is better than the agony of attempting small talk with the stranger next to you.
But Basic is almost worth seeing as unusually pure star vehicle for Samuel L. Jackson and John Travolta. Forget what I just said about Jackson acting in Basic. What he and John Travolta are really doing every moment onscreen is movie starring.
They’re not acting: they’re being goddamn movie stars, charismatic, flashy, larger-than-life household names with mega-watt smiles and unbelievable magnetism. They paid Jackson and Travolta handsomely to do their signature shtick onscreen and boy do they ever!
Samuel L. Jackson and John Travolta do not disappear inside their roles here. Instead the roles disappear inside their massive personas and equally huge performances.
Now maybe you do not respect me because I am a television actor. That’s fair.
The late Brody Stevens had a great line about how you should laugh at him by virtue of cadence alone. It almost didn’t matter what he said; his rhythms were so wild and unpredictable and funny that you laughed at what he was doing whether there were jokes or punchlines or not.
Jackie Mason and Eddie Pepitone are the same way. If Stevens, Mason and Pepitone are cadence comedians, Samuel L. Jackson is a cadence character actor whose joy in expressing his voice as loudly and dramatically as possible, both figuratively and literally, is both infectious and palpable.
Basic was sold as a John Travolta/Samuel L. Jackson vehicle that found the stars of Pulp Fiction sharing the screen for the first time since the iconic blockbuster and cult classic that made Tarantino and Jackson’s careers and brought Travolta back in the biggest way possible, to the point where Travolta’s role in Pulp Fiction has become useful shorthand for a successful comeback.
That’s understandable as well as deceptive and at least moderately dishonest. Because while Travolta is unmistakably the star of Basic, something he’s not going to let anyone forget for a single millisecond, Jackson is really more of a supporting player.
But what Jackson’s character lacks in screen time, he more than makes up for in impact. There’s an unmistakable Poochie dynamic at play with Jackson’s hard-ass Master Sergeant Nathan West: when he’s not on-screen, which is most of the time, the other characters are often talking about him and how simultaneously terrifying and impressive and terrifyingly impressive and impressively terrifying he is.
Travolta, sporting another regrettable hairpiece, stars as wisecracking, skirt-chasing showboat Tom Hardy. He’s an unfortunately named DEA agent (or is he?) who is the bane of drug enforcement because they think he’s gone dirty.
Yet when West (who once upon a time was Hardy’s own drill sergeant) and a number of other Army Rangers go missing during a harrowing training mission in Panama (or do they?) Travolta’s big swinging dick of an investigator is called in by old friend Colonel Bill Styles (television actor Tim Daly, reminding everyone why he will be half-remembered only for his negligible contributions to the small screen) to look into situation and find the guilty parties.
He’s assisted in his efforts by Captain Julia Osborne (Connie Nielsen), a hard as nails Military Police investigator who isn’t impressed by the outsider’s flashy ways and steady stream of sleazy come-ons.
Employing a series of questionably legal and/or ethical tactics, the moonlighting DEA agent and the military shamus talk to a series of witnesses, including Second Lieutenant Levi Kendall, the flamboyant homosexual son of a legendary military man played by Giovanni Ribisi, who brings real Truman Capote/Mason Verger energy to the film that feels both wildly out of place and weirdly welcome.
As he is prone to do, Ribisi goes wildly over the top. He seems intent on beating Travolta and Jackson in the over-acting Olympics despite spending much of his screen time in a hospital bed where he is dying the only way he knows how: as melodramatically and theatrically as possible.
Basic is Rashomon for Dummies. Seemingly everyone that our heroes talk to has a wildly different account of what happened during the training exercise, why it happened and who is ultimately responsible.
It’s twist after twist after twist after twist after twist. So many twists, each more twisty than the last! There are so many twists and turns in Basic that I wouldn’t be surprised if fright master M. Night Shyamalan was involved in the writing of its screenplay.
I can just see the producers gushing, “This twist you inserted in the script is great, Night! You’ve done it again!” only to have the overly confident auteur brag, “That’s nothing! You should see the seventeen additional twists! You LITERALLY won’t believe them! They don’t make sense!”
Yes, Basic is constantly jerking audiences around in a manner at once sadistic and just plain perverse. The seedy revelations come fast and furious. They were dealing drugs! And sleazy doctor played by Harry Connick Jr. is somehow involved! No one is who they seem to be! And who’s to say this isn’t all happening in the mind of an autistic child or prisoner about to be executed?
Basic is a whodunnit that will have audiences asking questions like “Whodunnit?” and “What’s going on with John Travolta’s hair? What monster let him be seen in public like that?”
Because none of the characters here function as anything more than delivery systems for increasingly insulting twists it’s impossible to care about who did it or why they did it, or what it could possibly all mean.
Before I began this project I got Basic mixed up with Travolta’s earlier military mystery The General’s Daughter and the Jackson vehicle The Rules of Engagement.
Here’s the thing: Basic is not, in fact, The General’s Daughter. That was problematic in its gender politics and icky and utterly forgettable, despite being co-written by William Goldman, screenwriter of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, All the President’s Men and The Princess Bride.
Basic, in sharp contrast, was written by James Vanderbilt, the future scribe of Zodiac and White House Down and directed by Die Hard and Predator auteur John McTiernan in a perpetual torrential downpour that represents pretty much the film’s entire visual aesthetic.
On another level Basic and The General’s Daughter are pretty much the same mediocre dad movies, disposable time-wasters that should really only be consumed by middle aged men who have sired offspring and have time on their hands to waste with nonsense like this.
Failure, Fiasco or Secret Success: Failure
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