OxfordPress.com

This is the confident Travolta, the one who graced "Pulp Fiction" and "Face/Off," not the bloated, lazy blob from "Swordfish" and "Lucky Numbers." Unfortunately, while Travolta may be paying attention, writer James Vanderbilt and director John McTiernan aren't -- or aren't enough. What could've been a really first-rate sting movie comes off as less complicated or focused than it should have been. And given a vacuum onscreen, Travolta starts chewing scenery and doing a little fancy prancing. (He first appears in a bathrobe that keeps flapping open, threatening indecent exposure.)

Roguish DEA agent Tom Hardy (Travolta) is asked by his old friend Col. Styles (Tim Daly) to come to an American Army base in Panama to investigate the disappearance of several cadets and their hard-nosed leader, Sgt. West (Samuel L. Jackson), during a routine training exercise in the jungle. The two survivors, Dunbar (Brian Van Holt) and Kendall (Giovanni Ribisi), agree that everybody else is dead, but their versions of how they got that way differ sharply. ("Rashomon" anyone?) The film gives us both stories in extended flashbacks -- drenched in rain and mud and yelling and gunfire -- that mostly show West sadistically picking on one of the new recruits, played by Taye Diggs.

On a mystery-suspense level, the movie works pretty well. McTiernan moves things along, and Jackson -- though he has less screen time -- is feeling just as bouncy as his co-star. But there's something too familiar about the makeup of West's squad -- the African-American, the privileged rich boy, the Latino, the redneck, the tough gal. Meanwhile, back in the present, Connie Nielsen's portrayal of the base's no-nonsense provost marshal is a disaster. Nielsen got a lot of work out of "Gladiator," but she's as bad here as she is in "The Hunted." And Ribisi acts like a giggly little psycho out of a '50s melodrama.

The movie strains to be showy and smart. Every "funny" piece of dialogue is punched up, as if the cast were doing a floundering "Saturday Night Live" skit. Further, there are "issues" -- stuff that's suitably Freudian and dealt with in a crushingly obvious manner.

"Basic" isn't a total waste of time. Some of the plot twists are quite good, evoking memories of "Primal Fear" and "The Sting." But the film is so clumsily -- and often confusingly -- told that you find yourself working awfully hard to stay with it.

However, that's what Travolta is there for. Whenever your mind starts to wander, he'll do some cocky little bit of business and you're pulled back in -- at least for the next few minutes, until things slow down and he does something else.