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25/08/2009

Basic Instinct 2 (2006)


This movie belongs here marginally. But even so, here is where it belongs. Do you know what really, REALLY bugs me about this movie? The fact that it really could have had been an awesome MILF-Thriller.
First and foremost I can’t help but saying that this movie marks the most monumentally outrageous, non-chemistry couple of all times. Sharon Stone (Catherine Tramell – quite like the overconfident young diabolic bombshell from Hell, from Basic Instinct) and David Morrissey (Dr. Glass – cold, tasteless and transparent as his classy, glass office) are otherworldly remote from each other. The possible casting failure of Morrissey is just fairly considerable (no news from him since then. Bummer.) Like two actors, in two different movies, which are Basic Instinct and this flick that didn’t turn out so well – not even in the consuming US box office. The main stars don’t meet on screen, don’t meet artistically, don’t meet as figures, don’t really meet in attitude, don’t meet when they meet, don’t meet when they speak and worst of all – they don’t meet when they fuck. I mean I have heard and I knew that “Antithesis bears Attraction” but this seems like the destruction and disproval of all I had heard and known.
All the amazing material from the first BI, now can be considered a tearful case of disappearance investigated by the CSI. All the hands-on magic and suspense, all the talent and ideas of the BI1 set of contributors (Verhoeven, Goldsmith, Eszterhas) are absent, if not awkwardly overlooked. Someone has to teach all these – rather capable of course – Michael Caton-Jones directors, that a sequel owes to be something further and better, not just something suchlike or totally dislocated from the original, with the always easy excuse of the “director’s personal view and vision”
It is not easy to ignore Sharon Stone but it’s not hard to notice the fake, hyper-bitchy, over-sexiness that she pulls through all way long in this painfully slow and nerveless film. No murderous confidence, no authentic manipulations, not that cold iron will, not really interested in psy-machinations anymore and with no useful help from the writers. In some scenes she shines, but mostly she just acts moistly, like the plastic, pathetic, loveless middle aged used-up executive whore from Catwoman, ready to succumb to drugs, alcohol and smokes, just to forget her past, present and future. Why not? Because, the supposedly deep psychological backbone of the script, may be sometimes catchy, but not good enough to support Killer Stone, or anyone else.
The whole script is a mediocre mess of improbable and aimless spins and turns, ups and downs (after fourteen years, we didn’t even get to see any of the other, the most wanted “ups and downs”) without really grasping the viewers’ eye and needed anxiety of a dark and dirty mystery film. It is the usual made-up illusion of an open-ended and thoroughly full of branches and interpretations plot, where there is no such thing available.
Supporting turns by David Thewlis and Charlotte Rampling, waste these fine actors on talky exposition scenes and cliché-heavy posturing, without adding all that a great colour in this blunt, dull and cloudy atmosphere of the movie.
Don't watch this film for carnal thrills and spills - there are none noteworthy and what there is, well, it is pretty lame, unintentionally funny and all that clumsy.
If Stone Cold Vanity partially inspired Sharon Stone to remake her powerful, domineering image with this movie, you must be stone called crazy to believe that any face, shot, margin, shade, resource and aspect of this movie is not centred on her. Frankly, she doesn’t seem to appreciate it all that much and the result is that everything else in this movie suffers more or less.
Basically, follow your instinct and see where the movie will lead you, but don’t make the mistake expecting some cult-status wet, overshadowed, urban and long lost Verhoevenian paradise.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Fuck man! You ruined my impressions! I liked this movie!It wasn't top, but...I liked it!

VA-Gunner said...

:)) The review difficulty always lies when the movie is neither at the top, nor at the bottom. The impressions consist a more long-lasting experience than...the first impression. Maybe you could have been the one to write such a review a year or two from now.