BY LARRY CARROLL | If you're the type of person who can give a movie credit for at least attempting to be intelligent, then you'll appreciate John McTiernan's writhing, raging, overly eager-to-please movie Basic. It tries so hard to be The Usual Suspects meets Rashomon meets The General's Daughter meets Wild Things that it ends up making itself dizzy with confusion, however. Like a chameleon trapped in a room full of rubber plants, whatever illusions it can conjure up are predestined for failure from its inability to realize the essence of what it's trying to be.

Six recruits head into a jungle for a training mission, and only two come out alive. To straighten out their stories and get to the truth, the military calls in Captain Julia Osborne (Connie Nielsen, The Hunted). When she fails to get a word out of frightened recruit Dunbar (Brian Van Holt, Whipped), her Commanding Officer looks for backup in the person of ex-Ranger Tom Hardy (John Travolta). Hardy was trained by a dictatorial drill sergeant named West (Samuel L. Jackson), the same man who trained these six recruits and apparently died with some of them in that jungle. The plan works, as Hardy and Dunbar find a bond in their common hatred of West, and soon the boy is telling more stories than the Brothers Grimm.

Osborne and Hardy form an uneasy, sexually powered alliance that has her talking business and him asking questions like "Can we skip over the witty banter and get to the part where I start hitting on you?" Together, they head to the hospital to speak with the other survivor, the wounded and heavily drugged recruit Kendall (Giovani Ribisi, Heaven). Kendall remembers the same basic facts as Dunbar - the stressed out recruits were dropped into the middle of a storm and heard a grenade go off, then rushed over to find West dead, then the suspicions of each other erupted into a hail of gunfire - but his version places the blame on different people. Why are their stories so different? What are these men trying to hide? What really happened to them? These are the questions that Osborne and Hardy must answer in one very long night.

Like the characters in his film, director McTiernan (Die Hard) tells a lot of lies, but most have just enough truth in them to keep fooling you. Everybody, it seems, gets a turn to be a good guy and a bad guy, and the movie also seems to equally dole out a moment of revelation from each character. For a good, long while the film will hold your attention with its tense urgency and ability to flip everything you know over on its ear. But, like John McNauton's Wild Things, the film keeps piling one twist on top of another, switching identities and loyalties until you just give up trying to play along. The difference, of course, is that Wild Things played it as a joke, whereas Basic wants us to believe that all this could actually occur. As the twists keep flying fast and furious, you have to make a choice - put your mind in "park" or risk getting a killer headache.

Most of the twists are pretty damn good, and would work if they were presented alone in their own movie. Especially the last one, which makes up for a lot of flaws. As you walk to the parking lot with your friends, though, you'll all be going "okay, so if this guy really did this, than why did he say that earlier?" quite a bit. Some of it, under closer scrutiny, will hold up. Other bits and pieces, however, aren't so lucky.

I would suggest that you bring a lot of Tylenol and stick it out, because Basic is a well-made film with solid acting and enough originality to make it worth seeing. In fact, I want to see it again, knowing what I know now, to see how much of the movie really does make sense.

I also wouldn't mind watching Travolta again, who gives his best performance since Primary Colors, as the self-assured but fatally flawed ex-soldier. His interrogation scenes with Van Holt are excellent, powered by a "who's going to tip his hand first?" suspense similar to the one that Spacey and Palminteri brought to The Usual Suspects. Hardy's swagger and willingness to lie for the cause keep him believable no matter what story the plot starts telling us, and that's a credit both to Travolta's "big lug" friendliness and his "devil with the blue eyes" intensity, both of which are cranked up throughout the flick.

I also wouldn't mind catching Sam Jackson's performance again. An actor who jumps off the screen in every scene he's in, my only gripe with him is that he doesn't get nearly enough screen time. Standing in the rain in camouflage fatigues, a beret and a cape, Jackson is in his element whenever he gets a chance to yell, which McTiernan allows him to do quite a bit of here. Jackson could make R. Lee Ermey cower in fear with the rapid-fire, identity-crumbling riffs he throws at his troops. If he ever decides to change careers, Mr. Jackson could easily start training Marines for the Iraqui war. I don't know how good they'd be at shooting a gun, but I can promise you one thing - they'd be some badass motherfuckers. Also worth noting is Harry Connick Jr., who brings style and charm to the table as a drug-dealing physician, and Taye Diggs (Equilibrium), practically unrecognizable for most of the film.

Probably the best performance, strictly on acting terms alone, comes from Ribisi. Laying in a hospital bed for ninety percent of his screen time, he still goes toe-to-toe with all the actors around him, and usually comes out on top. Ribisi, who started off years ago in teenage faire like "Blossom" and "The Wonder Years" has really come into his own as a Gary Oldman-type character actor who is never the same person twice. The actor morphs his voice into some kind of Mr. Howell-meets-Dr. Evil bass-filled tone with a rich kid accent that is as creepy as it is remarkable.

Less successful is Nielsen, who has some Southern thing going on that turns out to be one of the film's biggest mysteries. Like her sexual attraction for Travolta's character, the accent comes out just frequently enough to make you wonder where it's been hiding since its last appearance. Nielsen's character also has some unconvincing, awkwardly edited moments where she throws around men twice her size. She is trying hard to be Clarice Starling, but the difference is that Jodie Foster kept her accent, and her aggressiveness, in check.

McTiernan's style, his fast cuts and his love of close-ups, serves the story well. He can build his intensity around a big piece of scenery (as when Hardy holds a man's face inches away from a propeller blade) or with nothing but an actor's face (as in the final confrontation between Hardy and the miscast Tim Daly). He's a master at holding an audience's attention, but it's just a shame that he doesn't know when to quit. If you could cut out the last two or three twists and leave on the killer ending, Basic would be a much better movie.

Ultimately, like the young recruits accused of the crime, the movie tries hard to be a good soldier but gets mowed down prematurely. But it still deserves a medal or two for trying to be as good as it wants to be.

GRADE: B-