Basic Instinct 2 (2006)

I wrote in my original review of Basic Instinct that Catherine Tramell, the sluttish sex-addicted novelist played by Sharon Stone, was “less of a character than a walking Penthouse Forum”. I still hold that opinion. She was presented as a woman who has rough sex eagerly and often and during the down time talks only of what she does when she has rough sex. She dresses like a call girl and talks vulgarities about her sex life in a husky whisper then punctuates her sentences with pornographic buzz words.

The character was as thin as an eggshell, a woman who wasn’t much more than the sum of her parts, so when I heard the plot of Basic Instinct 2, I had a faint hope that we might get to the bottom of her behavior. When she goes to trial for her involvement in the death of a Soccer player (he was giving her manual sex while she was speeding her 2006 C8 Laviolette through the London streets at 110 mph before driving it into the drink) she is ordered into therapy because she is said to be suffering from a “risk addiction.” I thought that maybe the movie would dig underneath this trashy one-note character and unearth a psychological reason for her behavior.

This was not to be. Basic Instinct 2 is a trashy movie from one end to the other that doesn’t involve us, it only seems to want to titillate. The point of the movie is to watch Catherine jerk her therapist’s chain and lure him into bed. He is Michael Glass (David Morrissey) a good-looking guy who seems to be good at his job. That leads to the obvious question: Why was a patient with a voracious sexual appetite assigned a good-looking male therapist? Why not an older grandmotherly type? Why? Because then the movie couldn’t jerk us around with tiresome scenes of teasing and dirty double-entendres.

Personally, I would love to have seen a movie in which Catherine’s personality is analyzed. Let’s hear her back story so that we understand what led her into bisexuality and kinky sex games. What is that thrill? What makes her tick? What was her upbringing? What is she doing when she isn’t playing out the machinations of a sex-hungry nymphomaniac? Also, she is supposed to be a novelist but does she do her own writing? We see someone reading her book but, if memory serves, we never see her actually writing.

The core problem with this movie is that there is no involvement. It promises hot sex, which we get, but there isn’t anything more than that. We don’t care about the characters or what happens to them. When our vested interest boils down to whether or not we will get to see the characters naked and having rough sex, the movie falls into the dustbin of a third-rate soft-core porn movie. And, believe me, there are better ones out there than this.