Basic Instinct 2 looks like filet mignon, goes down like ground chuck: review
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at 12:39 on March 31, 2006, EST.
By DAVID GERMAIN


Novelist Catherine Tramell (Sharon Stone) is once again in trouble with the law in 'Basic Instinct 2.' (AP Photo/Columbia Pictures/Jaap Buitendijk)
(AP) - If nothing else, Basic Instinct 2 may solidify Sharon Stone's title as contemporary queen of high-end trash.

Often luridly laughable in its action, dialogue and huffy-puffy sexual imagery, this belated sequel to the 1992 guilty pleasure that launched Stone's career at least spares no expense in fashion, sets, cinematography and other technical trappings.

Basic Instinct 2 looks like filet mignon with satiny bearnaise sauce artfully accompanied by herbed new potatoes and a pretty parsley floret, but it goes down like ground chuck left festering in its own juices under the sun a few days.

If Stone looked anything less than hot, which she does, Basic Instinct 2 would be sad as well as tawdry, because it's always sad when someone tries to relive past glories if they no longer have the goods. Lean, firm and alluring, Stone clearly has not passed her femme-fatale expiration date yet.

A fair number of fans of the original may check it out, but the sequel is no more than a guilty piffle, good for occasional guffaws over its absurd language and some of Stone's predatory posturing, but mostly boring, despite all the sex.

Strangely, Stone is at her most erotic in the opening sex scene, the only one when she's fully clothed. Her black-widow crime novelist Catherine Tramell has moved from San Francisco to London, where she continues to mess with any XY-chromosomed members of the species unfortunate enough to cross her path.

At the start, Catherine's racing through London in her sports car while being pleasured by her doped-up companion, a British sports star. Stone's heaves and gasps are the most sexually honest moments in all the movie's rather goofily unpleasant fornication scenes.

Then director Michael Caton-Jones (Scandal, City by the Sea) plunges us into the over-the-top world of filmmaker Paul Verhoeven and screenwriter Joe Eszterhas, the sleaze-purveyors extraordinaire of the original Basic Instinct. Catherine's high-speed escapade ends with a literal bang, her passenger winds up dead, and our anti-heroine again is a prime suspect for murder.

Replacing Michael Douglas, who played the San Francisco detective Catherine seduced and degraded in the first movie, is David Morrissey as Michael Glass, a criminal psychiatrist assigned to evaluate her mental state.

Unlike Douglas, who has a gift for playing characters stable on the surface but dangerously squirrelly underneath, Morrissey's Glass is a rock at the outset, a man so on his game that it's just silly how easily and grotesquely he falls under Catherine's spell.

Bodies pile up as Catherine messes with the heads of Glass and the people around him, including his mentor (Charlotte Rampling, squandered in a throwaway role) and a Scotland Yard detective played by David Thewlis, who manages to flesh out a dry part with quirky humour that often makes him the most interesting presence on screen.

Other than some substantive roles on British television, Morrissey has been a bit actor or supporting player at best in such films as Captain Corelli's Mandolin and Hilary and Jackie. The stodgy blandness he exudes in Basic Instinct 2 is not likely to put him on any leading-man short lists.

But if Irishman Liam Neeson ever does a movie requiring a long-lost English cousin, Morrissey could handle the part. At times, Morrissey's deep-throated voice sounds uncannily like Neeson's, and the two actors share a passing resemblance.

Stone is costumed fantastically, though Catherine's backless dresses and skirts slitted thigh-high are such temptress stereotypes, the outfits provoke as many laughs as the vulgar exchanges in Leora Barish and Henry Bean's screenplay.

And Catherine's surrounded by the splendour of London, the filmmakers focusing on the city's modern architectural baubles and framing the characters in gluttonous luxury.

Stone again goes for broke as Catherine, playing the dragon lady with as much catty, black-hearted gusto as she did the first time. Yet while Stone's preserved well enough for the part physically, the thought that Catherine's still stuck in her pathetic little games of conquest all these years later is kind of sad.

One and a half stars out of four.


©The Canadian Press, 2006

Not surprising, it don't even look like filet mignon to me... more like a greazy McDonalds patty that's been smashed into the ground 50 times

CalhounSq said:

I almost burst out laughing when I saw the preview. This might be one of the biggest bombs ever. Sharon Stone is entertaining, though. In a car wreck kinda way.

A review in the morning news in Minneapolis set it on par with Glitter and Grease 2. He said it made Showgirls seem like an Oscar winner.

No Michael Douglas no BAsic Instinct 2 for me.

Man, I'm not even giving a thought to this film. I need my $10.75.

dewalliz said:

Exactly

luv4u said:

Your forgetting Douglas' fat partner and Stone's hot 'n angry lesbian lover. Those were the real stars

Who wants the deleted sex scenes?

You all didn't get the memo that states most "second" movies of a well established thriller that broke ground will suck?