JOHN Travolta is a notoriously erratic role picker. This time it was Chicago or Basic, and he backed the outsider not the short-odds favourite.

On the surface, you can see why he turned down the Richard Gere role. He had already done the egotistical if charming hoofer in Saturday Night Fever and Grease.

Basic offered him the chance to reunite with Pulp Fiction co-star Samuel L Jackson, and to play someone, in Travolta's own words, "smart, witty and with a confident air of sexuality about him". His territory, when on form.

He did the groundwork, buffing himself up for the role of maverick ex-Army Ranger turned investigative agent Tom Hardy. He not only lost 25lbs - early in the movie he parades in a towel on a balcony just to show off - but also undertook military training.

Was it worth it? No. Travolta has picked a dud, a tangled mess that suffers from the shock-and-awe direction of another erratic Hollywood grandee, John McTiernan. Basic is a military whodunit that turns into a whybother as McTiernan pumps up the volume, gets too flash with the speeding camera, all his sound and fury signifying nothing.

Here's the plot, or the first version of a nonsensical plot that keeps changing like a Beckham wardrobe. Over the head of the by-the-book chief of military police, Captain Julia Osborne (Connie Nielsen), Travolta's Hardy is enlisted to investigate why a routine military training exercise went wrong, leading to the murder of sadistic instructor Sergeant Nathan West (Jackson) and cracked-up members of an elite Special Forces training squad.

Bullets blaze, rain lashes down, James Vanderbilt's rapid-fire dialogue can barely be heard above the cacophony, and the script keeps re-writing itself in flashback as the two injured survivors (Giovanni Ribisi, Brian Van Holt) revise their accounts of what happened.

Was it mutiny? A drugs problem? Who cares. Early intrigue makes way for wearisome smartness that is strangely, spectacularly dumb. A hard slog for Travolta, Basic is an even harder slog to watch. Rubbish, basically.

Updated: 11:38 Friday, June 20, 2003