In 1992, Basic Instinct was a big hit: a trashy noir retread in which cop Michael Douglas had a steamy affair with mystery writer Sharon Stone, whom he suspected of being the perpetrator of a series of ice-pick murders. Stone’s character, Catherine Tramell, was bisexual (gasp!), and it turned out that her lesbian lover was responsible for the ice-pick stuff, though the movie also provided an ending of sufficient ambiguity to cast this in doubt, making a sequel possible. And here it is — Basic Instinct II. Fourteen years later.
Not that you’d know from the movie that 14 years have passed. Stone, in fact, looks younger than ever — so young that perhaps this should have gone as a prequel to Basic Instinct. She’s lithe and lissom and her forehead is so unlined that it seems to have been welded from hard, flesh-coloured plastic. She can’t frown at all, and the rest of her face is curiously static too. This is a bit of a disadvantage, because expressive acting requires facial mobility, and Stone can’t do much of that. Even when she’s trying to look sexy and mysterious, which is most of what’s required of her here, it all looks like a bit of a strain.
This time round we’re in London, where Catherine Tramell has presumably relocated since her spot of bother in the States. Catherine Tramell is a real movie name if ever there was one, yet she appears to write her books under the name Catherine Woolf, if the pile we see being bought at a bookshop is anything to go by. Yet she’s profiled on a magazine cover as Catherine Tramell. This confusion is never cleared up. But then it’s the least of the confusions we will have to suffer during the movie.
First we see her, Catherine is in a speeding car, which she’s driving. A soccer star in the passenger seat claims to feel paralysed from the neck down, thanks to all the drugs he’s on, but is nonetheless able to give Catherine some manual or digital stimulation. As she reaches orgasm (try not to burst out laughing at this point), the car crashes, flies into some nearby pond or lake, and the soccer player dies. Catherine is now up for murder once more.
In short order, she is grilled by two cops (one played by David Thewlis, the only credible character here) and then by the state psychiatrist. The grilling scenes are obviously important, because it was the grilling scene in the first Basic Instinct that offered the most famous crotch shot in movie history: Stone uncrossing and recrossing her legs to reveal that she wasn’t wearing any underwear. This naturally so dazzled the interrogating cops that they let her go. You’d have thought they were from Schweizer-Reneke and not San Francisco.
In the case of Basic Instinct II, primed by this expectation, one spends most of the movie waiting for Stone to uncross her legs again, but sadly, it doesn’t happen. She wears some very short skirts at times, in particular in one scene with the psychiatrist in question, and she seems about to perform her old trick again, but no genital revelations take place. The rest of the time she wears garments appropriate to a formal evening event, even when she’s lying on the psychiatric couch, shapely legs on display.
But back to the plot. And what a lot of plot there is. (Not that it helps.) British actor David Morrissey plays Dr Michael Glass, the state psychiatrist sent to evaluate Catherine. He decides she’s addicted to risk, which allows her to feel alive. If only Stone looked alive, that would be a plausible hypothesis. At any rate, after much pussyfooting, so to speak, Catherine seduces Dr Glass and drags him into her nefarious plans — if indeed they are hers. She may of course have been set up, for this is a plot that not only wants to have its cake and eat it too, but also be able to smear it all over someone’s naked body and lick it off while driving a sports car at 100 miles an hour.
The use of a psychiatrist instead of a cop as Catherine’s antagonist here means a more involved kind of investigation into the mystery of this mystery writer and perhaps killer. There is much play on the interaction of shrink and patient, with issues of trust and revelation coming to the fore; there is a considerable amount of psychobabble that is going as informed and knowing, but just feels like parody. So does the attempt to make Stone come across as some kind of sex goddess — she’s an unwittingly hilarious parody of the traditional femme fatale.
But the film as a whole is parodic, despite the fact that it takes itself all too seriously. This is trash, but it’s high-class trash, dammit! Dr Glass has offices in one of London’s most notorious buildings — Norman Foster’s “Gherkin”, a major new eyesore on the skyline, but obviously the filmmakers’ idea of a high-class location. How on earth Dr Glass, as a state shrink hoping for a chair at some university, manages to afford the rent is beyond explanation, but there he is. (It’s actually the headquarters for finance corporation Swiss Re and was commissioned by them.) Dr Glass has a big office, too, with lots of window space and a lovely view, as well as a foyer the size of an airport transit lounge. The filmmakers certainly aren’t thinking about credibility here, just about giving things a lot of upmarket gloss.
The gherkin building, in fact, is an apt icon for Basic Instinct II. It’s ugly and pretentious, with a totally misplaced sense of its own glamour. It sticks out of the London landscape like a whore at an old folks’ tea party. In the course of the movie, Catherine produces a cigarette lighter in the shape of the gherkin; it is meant, at that point, to be some kind of phallic symbol (I think), but in its miniature, bejewelled form, it’s even more ludicrous than the building itself. If that’s her idea of a desirable phallus, no wonder everyone thinks she’s psychotic.