Basic Instinct 2 (2006) MGM/Suspense-Thriller RT: 116 minutes Unrated (strong sexual content and nudity, language, violence, drugs) Director: Michael Caton-Jones Screenplay: Leora Barish and Henry Bean Music: John Murphy Cinematography: Gyula Pados Release date: March 31, 2006 (US) Cast: Sharon Stone, David Morrissey, David Thewlis, Charlotte Rampling, Hugh Dancy, Terence Harvey, Indira Varma, Heathcote Williams, Flora Montgomery, Anne Caillon, Iain Robertson, Stan Collymore, Kata Dobo, Jan Chappell. Box Office: $5.9 million (US)
Rating: NO STARS!!!
Sequels are not equals. Most times, they don’t even come close. Basic Instinct 2 ought to register for its own country code it’s so far removed from the 1992 original. I’m speaking in terms of style, quality, suspense and everything else. In my not-at-all humble opinion, it’s the absolute worst sequel ever made, bumping Speed 2: Cruise Control to the number two slot.
Sharon Stone returns as Catherine Trammell, the best-selling novelist/murder suspect with a forte for mind games and hot sex. She now resides in England where she finds herself on the wrong side of the law once again after being accused of killing her lover in a car accident. He drowned after she crashed the speeding car into the Thames River. She was pleasuring herself with his hand at the time. The investigating Scotland Yard detective Washburn (Thewlis, Naked) is convinced of her guilt after finding illegal drugs in the car. The psychologist, Dr. Glass (Morrissey, Hilary and Jackie), assigned to evaluate her determines she suffers from a condition he calls “risk addiction” (in addition to being narcissistic, manipulative and incapable of telling the truth). Basically, it means she gets off on taking risks.
Catherine signs up for therapy sessions with Glass and immediately begins her mind games. He, in turn, becomes obsessed with her. Then the bodies begin to pile up starting with the investigative journalist (Dancy, Ella Enchanted) doing a story on one of Glass’ old cases involving a patient murdering his pregnant girlfriend. Convinced that Catherine is committing the murders, he begins to unravel mentally.
My first thought regarding Basic Instinct 2 is that it’s a lot like one of those terrible sex-filled potboilers that typically air on Skinamax after hours. It’s like something that insomniacs might watch a few minutes of before switching over to an infomercial, any of which has to be more entertaining than this boring drivel. It is all-caps TERRIBLE on every imaginable level. For starters, it arrived about ten years later then it should have. Stone, who was never that strong an actress to begin with, was closing in on 50 when she reprised her iconic role. Her attempts at being sexy and seductive are simply pathetic now. I hate to sound like an ageist but she looks more like a MILF than a sexpot. This is easily a career low for Stone. Don’t forget, her body of work includes a Police Academy sequel.
All of the performances in Basic Instinct 2 are uniformly awful. Thewlis absolutely embarrasses himself with his horrendous overacting as a cop who may or may not be dirty. Morrissey is dull, dull, DULL!!! He maintains the same stony facial expression throughout the entire movie. There is nothing at all interesting about his character or the way he plays it. In one the movie’s many implausibilities, he manages to get laid more than once. Rampling (Angel Heart) is positively wasted as a colleague and friend of Glass. I’m astonished and aghast she actually signed on for this. Did she even bother reading the script first?
Stone is the only major player to return from the original Basic Instinct, an outstanding thriller in its own right. It’s equal parts sexy, suspenseful and sleazy. Basic Instinct 2 only manages the sleazy part and still botches it. Paul Verhoeven is replaced in the director’s chair by Michael Caton-Jones (Memphis Belle). The confusing screenplay is the work of Leora Barish and Henry Bean NOT Joe Eszterhas. They fail miserably in their feeble attempts at recreating Eszterhas’ dialogue with rotten lines like, “When you think about f—ing me, and I know you do, how do you picture it, doctor?”
The plot gets more muddled as the movie progresses. It depends largely on believing that a clearly disturbed woman is capable of manipulating EVERYBODY around her. She always has an alternate explanation for everything that goes down. Why would anybody trust a woman some would label a “crazy bitch”? Come on, there has to be at least one person who has her number. The writers also want us to believe that risk addiction is a viable courtroom defense. This element of the plot causes Basic Instinct 2 to lose its last scintilla of credibility.
The biggest offense committed by Basic Instinct 2 is that it’s BORING! The sex isn’t sexy. The thrills aren’t thrilling. The suspense level is zero. The score, which contains echoes of Jerry Goldsmith’s score for the original movie, does nothing except remind us of the better movie. The cinematography is drab and uninteresting even when the action takes place in a seedy part of London. The added two minutes of sex and nudity to the unrated version only make it longer not better. Even the violence fails to spark the slightest amount of interest.
Basic Instinct 2 is so bad, it can’t even be enjoyed on a guilty pleasure level. It bypasses it all the way back to bad. It then proceeds to go beyond bad to abominable. Then it passes that to abysmal and all the way though the thesaurus. There is absolutely nothing to recommend about this stinker but I do have an idea. Its original title was Basic Instinct 2: Risk Addiction. Why not drop Basic Instinct 2 from the title instead, recast it with grade-Z actors and sell it to Skinamax. I’m sure they have a 1:40am time slot to fill. Who knows? A few insomniacs might even tune in for more than five minutes.
