Image courtesy of www.impawards.com
Director :
Michael Caton-Jones
Cast :
Sharon Stone……….Catherine Davis Tramell
David Morrissey……….Dr. Michael Glass
Charlotte Rampling……….Milena Gardosh
David Thewlis……….Roy Washburn
Hugh Dancy……….Adam Towers
Subtlety is an art form that is easy to learn and yet hard to master. The difference between making a sly sexual reference and outright stating something is the true difference between making a top notch erotic thriller and c-grade level soft-core porn that goes direct to video. This difference between eroticism and pornography is something that Basic Instinct 2 never seems to fully grasp from the outset. It’s not that it straddles that line or floats on either side for long stretches of time; it completely misses the mark for the vast majority of its nearly two hour running time.
This time around Catherine Tramell (Sharon Stone) is in England, trying to escape the sort of murder mystery she portrayed in the film that made her an overnight sensation. After the death of a famous athlete (Stan Collymore) in the middle of a rather intense sexual act, Dr. Glass (David Morrissey) is assigned to evaluate her for the powers that be. Drawn into a web of murder, mystery and deceit, Glass has to try and maintain his sanity while trying to avoid Tramell’s web.
This sounds great in theory, as the character of Tramell had a lot of wasted promise in the original Basic Instinct that is just as wasted in this film. Tramell is a powerful woman, the sort of sexually-assured woman that could be a much more memorable character than she ends up being yet again. Stone brings her usual strong acting, which has always been her strong suit, and imbues the novelist with a strong personality that overcomes the poor writing and non-descript direction of this film.
Part of the problem is that the original film was most famous for the brief flash is that it cheapened a lot of Stone’s acting abilities. Basic Instinct and its sequel have strong performances from her, but it’s only because she’s a strong actress. Most of her part, as well as the rest of the roles in the film, are written as if they were made for upscale pornographic materials as opposed to an erotic thriller. The lack of any true subtlety in terms of what the actors have to say allows for the film to become a bad self parody of itself early and often.
It doesn’t help that the directing isn’t up to par for the sort of movie Basic Instinct 2 is trying to be. Part of being an erotic thriller is that there is a fine line to be walked to prevent it from becoming laughable. Certainly Michael Caton-Jones does the little things right, as his cinematography is tight and he uses an effective score to try and set the tone of the film. He also keeps the pace moving briskly, but some judicious editing of at least 20 minutes of useless subplots could’ve made the film a bit better. Where Caton-Jones fails is that with the exception of Tramell, the characters he is trying to build are relatively flat. Tramell is a bit developed, though his notion of developing her is as a person only capable of doing nothing but talk about sex in the way a 14 year old does. Part of that is due to the awful writing, but he takes what could be a great character and doesn’t do much with it.
| CATEGORY | SCORE |
| STORY | 3 / 10 |
| ACTING | 3 / 10 |
| LOOK/FEEL | 3 / 10 |
| ORIGINALITY | 3 / 10 |
| ENTERTAINMENT VALUE | 3 / 10 |
