Bruce Newman Says It All!

Sharon Stone brings over-the-top acting to lame 'Basic Instinct 2'

Bruce Newman
Mercury News
Published: Friday, March 31, 2006


Her eyes are the arctic blue of a thousand high-beam headlights, a mixture of hunger, heat and halogen. Her hair is spun from the dreams -- and the shag carpets -- of young boys who sometimes keep their doors mysteriously locked. This blond helmet has been fitted to her like the pharaonic headpiece of some ancient disco queen. (O, Narnians! What a White Witch you might have had if Sharon Stone had swiveled sluttily into her chariot!)

In ``Basic Instinct 2,'' crime novelist Catherine Tramell is the embodiment of rapacious want and addiction to risk, not to mention the dangers of driving with only one hand on the wheel. As unleashed by Stone in the sequel to the 1992 thriller that made her a star, this she-devil plays rope-a-doppelganger with London's top criminal psychiatrist, Dr. Michael Glass.

Her new playmate is a perpetual ``duh'' short of being Michael Douglas, star of the original picture and an actor whose sexual charge is sorely missed here. Caught in Tramell's web, Glass is a fly who's open to the operatic mind game she has in store for him. But in the clammy hands of a Liam Neeson knockoff named David Morrissey, Glass has the irradiated sexuality of a potato.

``Basic Instinct 2'' isn't merely so bad it's good, it's so bad-good that at times it's great. Stone's performance is so deliriously over-the-top that it turns almost every line she speaks into high camp. Sometimes she makes camp a little lower, and while the skin and sin are more talked about than shown in this movie, at 48, Stone is not bashful about unveiling the body God (or whoever it was) gave her. She said on a talk show recently that she stays in shape for this kind of work by doing sit-ups, and apparently she's also been doing sit-ups with her face.

The movie begins with Tramell gunning a Porsche Laviolette that sounds like a jet fighter through the deserted streets of London. In the passenger seat sits a large hunk of manmeat, whose finger she puts in her mouth, then moves in the general direction of the accelerator. Vroom, vroom! This is auto-erotic pleasuring at its fastest, if not its finest, and when the Porsche flies off a bridge and into the river, we are momentarily buoyed by the thought that she might drown. But she swims off, leaving the finger and its 200-pound attachment sinking to the bottom, along with the movie.

At the ensuing police interrogation, she can't seem to wipe the smile off her face. ``You were 'avin' sex at 100 miles per hour?'' asks an incredulous Detective Superintendent Roy Washburn (David Thewlis).

``A hundred and ten,'' she says, smirking smirkily. ``I musta hit a pothole.''

Or maybe that's just the Botox talking. Anyhoo, she is remanded to the psychological custody of ``the crown shrink,'' whose office, naturally, is in the famous Gherkin Tower, Sir Norman Foster's glass phallus -- or pickle, if you will -- erected triumphantly in the heart of London. Entering the eminent loony doctor's office in a low-cut cocktail dress perfect for a little brainslap and tickle, she looks him over hungrily and says, ``This where we're gonna do it?''

Appealing to Glass' vanity, she suggests he might be able to help her. You know, therapeutically. He declines. She insists. He caves. This is the customary cha-cha-cha of forensic psychiatry, of course, and a prelude to their gross-out sex scene later. Glass arrives at a diagnosis of severe ``risk addiction'' after she reminisces giddily about joyriding through the streets of San Francisco in the first movie, arriving at murder scenes where the bodies were still warm. ``You can smell the blood,'' she says, waxing nostalgic.

That, presumably, is what she does when she's not waxing Brazilian. Or preparing for late-night psych sessions in the jacuzzi at her louche London lair, where the walls are all black and the fireplace looks like a gateway to one of the seven circles of hell. Catherine Tramell smiles her vulpine smile, and welcomes you into a movie in which even the camera is promiscuous, seeing just what it wants to see, whether or not that has any relationship to what's really going on in what passes for a plot.

In one of the first imitators of ``Basic Instinct'' -- which had made $350 million just a year earlier -- Madonna set the bar high for lurid trash and peekaboo porn in 1993 with ``Body of Evidence,'' doing the nasty with Willem Dafoe. That was a picture of such epic badness that its director, Uli Edel, never made a feature again, a fate now to be wished upon Michael Caton-Jones, perpetrator of ``BI2.'' Like the gloriously awful movie he has made, his instincts are less often basic than simply base.