Basic Instinct 2

Mario Kassar totally missed an opportunity with this film. Rather than rehash the premise and main character from his hit 1992 erotic thriller Basic Instinct, he should have just started up a franchise of films in which Sharon Stone flies all over the world having exotic sex with mysterious strangers. Change a few names and references to Paul Verhoeven's original film, and this could easily have been an original thriller - Sharon Stone Goes to London.

Then more films follow.

Sharon Stone Goes to Egypt
Sharon Stone Goes Hawaiian
Stone in Africa
Sharon Stone in The Curse of the Emerald Moose
Sharon Stone Meets the Harlem Globetrotters

The possibilities are endless. Not to mention the added bonus of not having to make a film in which an opening credit reads "based on characters created by Joe Eszterhas."

Instead, Kassar and Andrew Vajna have given us a retread of the original film 14 years later, slathering on a bunch of unneccessary hairpin turns, psychobabble and last-second twists to make their cinematic leftovers taste more palatable. Imagine a John Waters production of Sleuth starring Divine and Frank Whaley doing a British accent.

I'm not going to complain that Sharon Stone is too old to be sexy in a Basic Instinct movie. She is, and the lighting and make-up tricks they try to pull off to de-age her are ludicrous and ineffective, but she's not the problem with this movie. She's the only one who seems to know the purpose of the entire enterprise. It's not a good performance. In fact, it may be the worst of her career, if by "worst" you mean "most self-aware and campy." (Okay, momentarily forgot about Catwoman. Second-worst.)

But this entire film is ridiculous, a joke from beginning to end. Better to be taking it as a joke, overacting and flailing about, than play it boring and straight like the rest of the cast, who all seem to think they're in a real movie. The only scenes that are interesting feature Stone slinking around the set like a stripper with rickets.

I'm just fascinated by her idea of sexiness. In the first film, her character was a bisexual adrenaline junkie and master of seduction who may or may not be a serial killer. In order to top that already overripe turn, she chooses to play the role as a porno actress might, unbuckling the pants of every featured male character with her eyes at all times. She doesn't actually take off her clothes too often, but the entire role has an exhibitionist feeling; she's either really getting off on being "sexy" for moviegoers, or she wants us to think she is.

Unfortunately, we're expected to actually follow an intricately plotted, rather drab whodunit in between the moments when Sharon Stone threatens to show us her beaver again. To say that the story never really comes together into something intense or interesting would be a massive understatement. This narrative is more lifeless than that guy who got an icepick stuck in his eyeball in the first film.


What are you gonna do? Arrest me for sucking?

Novelist Catherine Tramell (Stone) has moved to London since the events of the first film (where she was cleared of all murder charges despite probably being guilty), but still gets off on outlandish, depraved acts of sexuality. To wit, she opens the film by getting into a massive car accident while being serviced by a well-known footballer.

This brings her under some measure of police suspicion, with crooked cop Roy Washburn (terrific actor David Thewlis, in yet another stop on his Grand Tour of Piece of Shit movies) particularly interested in finding out more about this woman and her bizarre addiction to risk. (The original title of the film was Basic Instinct 2:Risk Addiction, which would have been the best part of the movie if they'd kept it).

He turns to Dr. Michael Glass (David Morrissey), who we're told is a brilliant psychotherapist but who's manipulated by Catherine with relative ease. When more murders begin happening, he becomes convinced that she's innocent even though she's probably not or is she and blah blah blah blah fuckidy blah.

A movie like this, which is constantly trying to pull the rug out from under you, can definitely work under the right circumstances. David Mamet has mastered the art of manipulating the audience without actually cheating them, providing real information in just such a way to keep you in the dark to the larger picture. In his earlier films, M. Night Shyamalan demonstrated an ability to build a complete and satisfying story in bite-sized chunks, waiting until the erfect moment to present the final piece of the puzzle.

Michael Caton-Jones here demonstrates none of that ability. After the third or fourth reinvention of the storyline, it's impossible to maintain any real interest in what's happening. Here's a hint: perhaps there's so many possibilities as to who's killing everyone because there isn't much of a story going on and the audience doesn't actually get to know anything about any of the characters that might provide motives or clues to the central mystery.

If there were lots of sex, perhaps, it would probably compensate for the idiotic mechanics of this plot. But there's really only a few brief scenes in between a lot of dreary exposition and sequences wasting the talent of actors like Thewlis and Charlotte Rampling, who shows up in a small role as Dr. Glass' colleague. Sharon shows off the unmentionables and they look well-maintained and everything, and she definitely gets marks for bravery. But it's not exactly reason enough to sit through all the mealy-mouthed, pseudo-clinical explanations of human sexuality.

By the time the final scene rolls around, it's so removed from any kind of reality, Sharon Stone could literally say anything to Dr. Glass and it would be blindly accepted by the audience.

"As I'm sure you realize by now, Doctor, I'm really a Somali warlord who has just been using you to funnel munitions to my countrymen in Mogadishu."

"So, you're saying that, this entire time, we've been inside the belly of a whale?"

"Those walnuts I gave you were poisoned, Dr. Glass, but it doesn't matter because I'm actually a telepath. Now let's go find the Holy Grail! But first, here's a 10-second shot from a weird angle of the underside of my right thigh!"