Left to right, John Travolta, Connie Nielsen and Brian Van Holt in the film "Basic." (Gannett News Service, Gene Page / Columbia Pictures). Basic Starring: John Travolta, Samuel L. Jackson, Connie Nielsen. Director: John McTiernan. Rated PG-13: Profanity, graphic violence. Running time: 98 minutes. view the trailer | official website Tom Hardy, an ex-Army Ranger turned DEA agent, is drawn into an ever-widening mystery surrounding the disappearance of the feared and often hated Sgt. Nathan West, as well as several of his elite Special Forces trainees on what appears, at first, to have been a routine training exercise during a hurricane in the jungles of Panama. What happened to West and his Ranger team? And what were they really doing out there in the jungle? As each layer reveals more lies and greater deceptions, Hardy and Capt. Julia Osborne inch towards the horrible truth about the fate of the missing Rangers.

by Marshall Fine, Gannett News Service

"Basic," written by James Vanderbilt, is a military "Rashomon" story, a la "A Few Good Men" or "Courage Under Fire." Something has happened and now an investigator must come in and sort through the various versions to find out exactly what did occur.

In this case, the event being studied is a training mission gone wrong. A ruthless Army Ranger drill instructor named Nathan West (Samuel L. Jackson) took six of his cadets into the bush near their base in Panama in the middle of a hurricane, as a training exercise. The next day, when the helicopter came to pick them up, only two men were alive - and West wasn't one of them.

So the base commander Bill Styles (Timothy Daly) calls in an old friend, Tom Hardy (John Travolta), to investigate. Hardy is no longer a military man. He's a disgraced DEA agent who, having busted a major drug lord, is being investigated for taking bribes from his quarry. But, as Styles says, there's no one who can conduct an interrogation like Hardy.

Hardy is teamed with suspicious lieutenant Julia Osborne (Connie Nielsen), who hasn't had much success questioning survivors. She believes Hardy is a loose cannon. It's not hard to see their antagonism will be turned inside out, just like everything else in this film.

It's impossible to describe much more about the mystery being unraveled without giving the film away, except to say that nothing is what it appears to be. That's to be expected, given the movie's ad line: "Deception is their most dangerous weapon."

But Vanderbilt's script and John McTiernan's direction have a brittle, mechanical quality.

You can feel the gears grinding, whether in the larger plot or in the smaller moments between Nielsen and Travolta. The various twists feel contrived - betcha didn't see that coming - instead of organic.

Travolta breezes through this role with the amused and over-heated self-assurance he had in the films of John Woo ("Broken Arrow," "Face/Off"). There's a playful quality to his performance that's engaging, even when the plotting is hard to swallow. Jackson is in his element as the thundering, godlike drill instructor.

Nielsen, who is Danish, has an accent that's all over the place - or, perhaps, just all over the South. Giovanni Ribisi, an exciting young actor who might be the Elisha Cook Jr. of his generation, does nice work as one of the surviving Rangers.

"Basic" is never less than engaging, but also never less than arbitrary. Travolta's performance keeps things watchable, but you won't be scratching your head so much as shaking it when the game is finally revealed.