Remember that movie that was only famous for its beaver shot but not for actually being a good movie? Yeah, let's make another one of those.\ Well put, David Spade, well put. Spade was referring to the baffling decision to make a sequel to 1992's ""Basic Instinct,"" a trashy thriller scripted by notoriously-overpaid sleaze peddler Joe Eszterhas (""Showgirls,"" ""Jade"") and directed by Paul Verhoeven (""Starship Troopers,"" ""RoboCop,"" ""Total Recall"").
While nobody will ever mistake it for being a legitimately decent movie, ""Basic Instinct"" launched Sharon Stone's career, emerged as the most exploitative of Michael Douglas' pantheon of sexcapade cinema and was overall a fun, campy exercise in kitschy overkill. And yes, it still is most infamous for its interrogation scene in which Stone sultrily proves to a room full of detectives that she indeed prefers to go commando.
For some time, it seemed that a sequel would come along any day, but the project remained stalled in developmental hell with the occasional rumor that it was back on track. Now, 14 years later, we've got ""Basic Instinct 2: Risk Addiction,"" and although almost everyone expected it to be terrible, certainly no one predicted it would be this awful. This film is strenuously bad and a significant failure on every conceivable level; a pristine example of corporate profit-lust flying in the face of common sense, it is one of the most inept movies ever made.
Stone returns as Catherine Tramell, the seductive, promiscuous novelist whose potboilers always seem to parallel the murderous events that befall her acquaintances. This time, she is being investigated for her dubious role in a car accident involving reckless speeding, a crotch massage and the mysterious, drug-related death of her footballer lover. Her avowed nemesis, crabby Scotland Yard detective Roy Washburn (David Thewlis), has her psychologically evaluated by Dr. Michael Glass (David Morrissey), a gravely professional shrink who diagnoses her with ""risk addiction,"" a simplified psychobabble definition that highlights the film's thematic concerns in a most painfully obvious way. Pretty soon, Tramell has set her sights on Glass and is seeing him for therapy, and unsurprisingly the bodies start to pile up yet again.
Aside from the energetic, appallingly-conceived opening scene, ""Basic Instinct 2"" is leaden and tedious. Compared with Verhoeven's shrewd, insidious B-movies or Eszterhas's go-for-broke sordidness, this film is boring, sluggish trash—a torpid mass of atrocious acting (even from members of its talented ensemble), poor screenwriting and embarrassing bouts of self-referential, cutesy attempts at humor.
""Basic Instinct"" was stupid but kind of sexy, as its bedroom misadventures were integral to the plot, but this stagnant update is curiously devoid of any semi-interesting carnal antics. Instead, Michael Caton-Jones (a director whose best film, ""Rob Roy,"" is still the poor man's ""Braveheart"") and his hack screenwriters opt to foist upon us endless scenes of supposedly enticing, titillating ... conversation. Try as she might, Stone can't sell howler lines like, ""Even Oedipus didn't see his mother coming,"" and expressionless counterpart Morrissey's stunning blandness doesn't help matters either. When it finally gets around to the sex, it's the kind of joyless pelvic thrusting you'd expect from something on late-night Skin-e-max, where it looks more like the guy is attempting to hump the girl's belly button.
While Stone comes across less as a slinking man-killer and more as a slutty teen trapped in the body of a gracefully aging (but still aging) grandmother, Morrissey reminds of Liam Neeson without a single vestige of charisma. Morrissey is so wooden he makes Steven Seagal look like Laurence Olivier, and for all of her dusty feminine wiles, Stone might as well be coming on to the wall. The film's stillborn drama is exacerbated by its super-glossy production design which, for all its shiny interiors and almost futuristic architecture, only serves to remind us more and more of the similar-looking ""Catwoman,"" Stone's last foray into Razzie-bait territory.
""Basic Instinct 2"" is a whopping misfire lacking any eroticism, purpose or curiosity as a piece of certifiable camp. Unless they wait another 14 years to make a sequel called ""Basic Instinct 3: Wanton Geriatric,"" in which Tramell beguiles the handsome-but-troubled orderly in her posh nursing home, ""Basic Instinct 2: Risk Addiction"" is Stone's most embarrassing hour.
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