Archive
March 2006
Volume 2

all movies are graded out of four stars ()

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Basic Instinct 2 (R) BUY THE: Poster! | DVD! | Blu-ray! | Soundtrack! That the long-in-the-works, far-too-late-for-anyone-to-give-a-damn-anymore sequel to Paul Verhoeven's wildly successful and influential 1992 erotic thriller is a complete bomb is hardly surprising. But what is a surprise--nay, a shock--is how utterly boring the film is. It would've been easy to dismiss Sharon Stone's shameless attempt to recapture her long-faded glory as desperate, but this pathetic film doesn't qualify as the term desperation implies some amount of effort, and there's none on display on this sloppy exercise. What one would hope would be a campy, bad-movie-that's-awesome is instead a murky, listless snoozer that isn't so much about Stone's bisexual, panty-flouting novelist Catherine Tramell than a blank shrink (played by the zero-charisma David Morrissey) caught up in her mind games. I'm not one of those "sex violence = good" moviegoers, but when it comes to the Basic Instinct brand name, that's what you want and expect. However, there's actually very little sex here (and what is there is obviously and sloppily cut down from more explicit levels); and while there are number of dead bodies, we actually don't see very much killing at all--except, maybe, that of the careers of Morrissey and Stone. It seems that she forgot what truly made the character and her performance so alive in the first film; while the infamous interrogation scene and all manner of body exposure is what people generally talk about, the real accomplishment was making such a character believably vulnerable beneath the vivacious vamping. Watch the original now, away from the hype about the sex and the nudity and the uncrossed legs, and you see how Stone and director Verhoeven made Catherine an actual person; she may have been a master manipulator, but the fears and insecurity and emotions--particularly in the penultimate scene, where she pleads with Michael Douglas's character that she doesn't want to lose him as she did so many in her life--while possibly not being genuine, were convincing. In Basic Instinct 2, Stone and in-over-his-head director Michael Caton-Jones play Catherine as the pop culture icon, where every action is such an obvious, would-be-titillating put-on, and as such the act gets old really fast. The novelty even seems to wear off quickly for Caton-Jones and the crew, for after the sleazy howler of an open, they become disinterested and careless. The fact that whenever the name of Douglas's character, Nick Curran, is mentioned, the pronunciation isn't consistent with that used in the original more or less sums up how committed all involved are to this rather pitiful waste.

B L O G U P D A T E S

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