You won't be disappointed!

By the time the dramatic fireworks start popping off, each one feels earned.

The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

I enjoyed watching this film and would recommend other to give it a try , (as I am) but this movie, although enjoyable to watch due to the better than average acting fails to add anything new to its storyline that is all too familiar to these types of movies.

I just finished streaming this flick for the first time on the free section of Amazon Prime Video and i was bored throughout, i continued to stick with it until the very end because as a film critic at heart as well as an unpaid critic i will always give a film a chance after i hit the "watch now" button unless it becomes unwatchable, this movie is not that, but it is everything else bad, it is slow-paced, the acting is fine - but that isn't the problem, the problem is the overall plot! for a thriller it is not thrilling, it is not suspenseful even though they desperately try and make it that way. I'll give this film a 2 rating instead of 1 because the plot-twist is actually clever and unexpected, but overall this movie is just not very good.

BASIC is a very dumb military thriller and the last film (to date) to be directed by John McTiernan, the former great who brought us DIE HARD and PREDATOR. This film's a far cry from those movies and even from John Travolta's previous military film, THE GENERAL'S DAUGHTER. It's an attempt at a RASHOMON-style narrative in which the disappearance of a group of soldiers is told in flashback in different ways by multiple witnesses, but the script is badly-written and gets bogged down in one silly twist after another, eventually causing the viewer to lose interest in the exercise. The actors are on autopilot here, including Samuel L. Jackson, and the end result is tedium rather than excitement.

I'm normally a fan of John Travolta, but as other reviewers have said, there are just too many plot twists and turns, mixed in with a variety of flashbacks, so that in the end you stop caring. Or rather, you are thinking when told yet another version of events "really, well maybe, but I'll just treat that as hypothetical for now". Note to director, if you are going to perpetually change a plot, you have to first get us invested in the first one. If you just sketch out one plot line, then quickly skip to another, we just don't care. This reminds me of Kurosawa's Rashomon, where 4 different accounts are presented of a rape and murder. Rashomon however, does not leave one feeling frustrated in the way this movie does. But back to the movie. I was struggling with the realism of this OLD movie having a female Ranger since they weren't allowed to serve till April 2016. If she had been a butch muscular woman maybe I could swallow it, but she was petite and very cute. Then one of the guys was blatantly gay - and this is before "Don't ask, don't tell" was scrapped. So now I was waiting for the black disabled lesbian Ranger to appear in the next scene, just so we can all be politically correct.The straw on the camel's back came in the middle of yet another discussion in the rain soaked hut. There were at least 70 lighting flashes over a 3 minute scene. I was wondering if the "training exercise" was taking place on the planet Venus, or did the lighting engineer have a dodgy power supply? The map shows lightning flashes per sq km per year, with black / max at 70:http://geology.com/articles/lightning-map.shtml Since that jungle hut experienced a few year's worth of lightning in the course of that one scene, I guess the rest of the year was just peaceful and sunny? For me, the movie descended from 'hostile training environment' to pantomime, and I switched it off.

All I'd like to say is that this movie sucks on so many levels. John Travolta as usual was very charming in his portrayal of an ex marine, current super Investigator. Samuel L. Jackson too gives a short but powerful performance as a cold military instructor. It was a gigantic waste of my time. I can understand movies which tell the stories from different people's perspectives like A Few Good Men. But the sheer number of characters in this movie makes it nearly impossible to keep note of who actually died and who didn't. I had completely lost all interest in the plot by the time the movie ended. Ending - Disappointing !