Buy it... only if you become entranced by serviceable and mechanical military thriller scores of a variety that Klaus Badelt and other Media Ventures graduates seem to have no problem churning out.

Avoid it... if you want any of your expectations to be surpassed by this bland, uneventful exercise in electronic textures and token ethnic accents.

Badelt

Basic: (Klaus Badelt) Director John McTiernan had many chances in the late 1990's and early 2000's to resurrect the stunning success with which he burst onto the scene in the late 1980's. After spoiling audiences with Predator, Die Hard, and The Hunt for Red October, McTiernan killed his career with Last Action Hero, The 13th Warrior, and Rollerball. The final nail in the coffin proved to be Basic in 2003, a hopeless attempt to execute the ultimate in clever audience deception. A horrendous script stole significant inspiration from Courage Under Fire, investigating a military event in flashbacks from the perspective of incongruent participants. In this case, a group of Rangers training in Panama disappears, and somewhere in between the drug trade and corrupt officers, the unsavory truth lies. The most unsavory truth about Basic was the fact that it failed to return its estimated $50 million budget, likely the final reason McTiernan didn't debut another film during the remainder of the decade. Scathing reviews quickly pointed to the abysmal plot, one that tried so hard to manipulate the audience that it became either incredibly annoying or frustrating. The director had worked with several major composers over the course of his career, from Alan Silvestri and Jerry Goldsmith to Michael Kamen and Bill Conti. One aspect of these collaborations was that none of these composers proved to be McTiernan's go-to guy; by the final years, Graeme Revell, Eric Serra, and Klaus Badelt rounded out the group with often odd and disjointed efforts. Badelt was coming into his own in 2002 and 2003, finally making an earnest departure from the collaborations with Hans Zimmer that guided his career since arriving in Los Angeles from Germany five years earlier. During the early 2000's, before Badelt largely slipped out of mainstream view, the composer was involved with a series of mysteries and thrillers that in a few cases also involved militaristic themes. Unfortunately, many of these efforts were procedural and failed to really show the kind of potential that Badelt surprised listeners with in 2006 with The Promise. Clearly, Basic belongs in this substandard group, and if you found the composer's music for The Recruit to be uninspiring, then Basic won't impress much either.

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You could not imagine a score more predictable than Basic. It even utilizes Ramin Djawadi as an additional composer and arranger, a sign that you've graduated from Zimmer's school and achieved a level of status worthy of your own ghostwriters. The ensemble is common to Media Venture leftovers, an array of electronic rhythm-setters and sampled sounds merged with a handful of exotic woodwinds and other accents meant to address the Panama setting. It's difficult to determine if the orchestral sounds in Basic are real or sampled; they've usually been processed to such an extent that you can't tell the difference anyway. As such, they generally sound like faux strings and faux brass in their typical staccato format, albeit at a much slower and less forceful rate than established by Zimmer and Mark Mancina in the golden years of these techniques. On the subject of those two composers, it should be mentioned that the use of exotic flutes, simple melody, and synthetic bass enhancements in Basic never comes close to achieving the same intoxicating appeal as Beyond Rangoon or Return to Paradise. Part of that difference is due to the low key approach taken by Badelt to Basic. This is a score that simmers for its entire length, building up to a series of small crescendos in short cues (to match the many twists in the story). Almost every one contains the score's only major theme, a series of ominous pairs that usually trails off after the first two. So frequent is Badelt's referencing of this theme that the score quickly becomes monotonous. The instrumental shades never really mature beyond the extremely restrained crescendos and a feeling of resolution in the final cues. There is no beginning, middle, or end to this work, nor is there any true panic or urgency in its rhythms. Badelt seems to have a way of stating all the right things with his music without capturing the intangible emotional appeals of the story, and Basic is no different. This music is as stale as it could be, sufficient in a basic sense but never excelling beyond minimum atmospheric requirements. It ranks a "0" on the style scale. That, combined with the film's overall failure, precluded the possibility of a commercial album release for Basic, though within a year of its debut, undaunted Media Ventures fans got a hold of a decent copy of the score and pressed a 54-minute bootleg. Sound quality on this leak is decent, but lacking dynamic range, and unless you're a Badelt enthusiast, steer clear of this unnecessary bootleg. **   Amazon.com Price Hunt: CD or Download

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For Klaus Badelt reviews at Filmtracks, the average editorial rating is 3 (in 11 reviews) and the average viewer rating is 3.19 (in 99,833 votes). The maximum rating is 5 stars.