- If you're not a member why not Start a FREE trial
- Already a member? Sign in here
- Get our newsletter
- Help
|
Basic Instinct 2
The last time Sharon Stone uncrossed her legs there was a Bush in the White House. So controversial even screenwriter Joe Estzerhas condemned it, the first Basic Instinct remains the most maligned erotic thriller: like most of its ilk, it's glossy psycho porn at heart, but between them director Paul Verhoeven and star Sharon Stone made Catherine Trammell a femme fatale for our times, a Nietzschean hedonist who gets off on mind-games. It's impossible to imagine what Katy did next - although we can assume that marriage to Detective Nick Curran (Michael Douglas) didn't figure in her long-term plans. Thirteen years later, she resurfaces in London, still a free woman, and still collecting corpses at every turn. First: Stan Collymore contributes a comatose cameo, obliviously fingering la Trammell as she drives through the Docklands at 110mph before crashing into the Thames. It's a risible opening gambit (perhaps Catherine's seen Cronenberg's Crash too many times?*) but enough to bring her to the professional attentions of psychiatrist Dr Michael Glass (David Morrissey) and police inspector Roy Washburn (David Thewlis). Dr Glass diagnoses her as risk addicted, predicting that only her own death will stop her, but the judge sees things differently and next thing you know she's making herself at home on his couch. 
There's an onerous back story attached to Glass - something about a former patient who went on to kill his pregnant girlfriend, and maybe the doc should have shopped him it's almost too dull to relate here, and even more boring in the movie, which was still called 'Basic Instinct' last time I checked, not 'Guilty Pleasures'. Glass is no match for Catherine - she can see right through him - but then who would be? Certainly not Hugh Dancy's tabloid muckraker, who ends up hoisted on his own petard. Nor Glass's ex wife, who makes a mess in the washroom of the Atlantic Grill. Even the redoubtable Charlotte Rampling - the ultimate eminence grise - seems to swallow American's bait. Unfortunately the audience isn't likely to fall into the same trap. Neither the screenwriters (husband and wife team Henry Bean and Leora Barish are credited) nor Stone pay more than lip service to the admittedly far-fetched possibility that Catherine may be innocent, which makes Glass's actions seem positively cracked. Basic Instinct 2 is not the complete clunker we all had every right to expect, but its competence is a kind of trial. Bean and Barish have concocted an implausibly convoluted mystery that another filmmaker might have been tempted to camp up. Not dour Michael Caton-Jones (whose Shooting Dogs is also on general release right now) who treats every twist and turn in deadly earnest. Only David Thewlis takes license to goose the material a little with his unfashionable moustache and unfathomable accent. Cinematographer Gyula Pados (Kontroll) gives London a slick sheen you don't often associate with the dirty old town, and the filmmakers pump the Gherkin for all its phallic worth (Glass's office must be a floor below Jonathan Rhys Meyers' Match Point workplace), but the relentlessly eroticized atmosphere doesn't extend to Stone's scenes with Morrissey. 
It's not necessarily the actors' fault that they don't generate any charge together. Catherine is Stone's best role, and she plays it with tremendous poise and authority in the circumstances, but for all her carnal appetites this is not a flesh and blood character - she's a vamp, basically, and every scene entails more lurid self-exposure. Yes, Shazza looks fantastic for her age (or any other), but let's not forget that the first film's notorious interrogation scene wasn't just about showing some skin - it was about how that defiant gesture wormed under the skin of a roomful of salivating cops; in other words it was about power. The erotic thriller never really topped that moment, and it wasn't for want of trying - but like Sliver, Jade and the rest, the flashpoints in Basic Instinct 2 don't feel sexy, liberating or empowering, they just feel degrading. Tom Charity * Cronenberg was once in talks to direct the sequel. 
More information about Basic Instinct 2 » Critics' ReviewsEntertainment Weekly Stone successfully revives her performance as Catherine....It's a treat to see Stone rev her evil-vixen engine again... Total Film Thewlis manages to make you believe in his character and steals all of his scenes... Members' ReviewsReviews Voted Most HelpfulMost Recent Reviews |